Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Clinton's Inaugural Address: A Case Study

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) as an'instrumental linguistics'was proposed by Fowler,Hodge and Kress in 1970s. Since then, it has become one of the most influential and visiblebranch of discourse analysis. Generally, CDA is concerned with studying and analyzingwritten texts and spoken words to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance,inequality, and bias and how these sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced, andtransformed within specific social, economic, political, and historical contexts (Van Dijk,1997).CDA is not a new approach to analyze the discourse. Many kinds of news discourses havebeen analyzed by CDA. However, political speech as target discourse in application of CDAhas received relatively little attention. This thesis takes President Clinton's inaugural addressas an example to explore how a politician achieves his political goals in a political speech.Halliday's systemantic functional grammar becomes the main source of theoreticalfoundation and methodology of this thesis, for CDAconsiders language as a multifunctionalsystem. In this thesis, the author analyzes the discourse from the three metafunctions, whichform the main bodypart. Firstly; it tries to figure out what kind of methods are employed bypoliticians to achieve political goals; secondly, it tries to explore the relations between theideology, power, and language in its deep level; thirdly, it tries to enhance the criticalawarenessofpeopleintermsoftherelationbetweenlanguage,socialandpoliticalfactors.From the study, the author makes conclusions as follows: firstly, the politician, PresidentClinton, employs various methods from all the three metafunctions(ideational, interpersonaland textual) to enforce his ideology upon the audience. For instance, transitivity andtransformation are employed in ideational metafunction; mood structures, personal pronounsand modal verbs are employed in interpersonal metafunction and thematic choice isemployed in textual metafunction. Generally, the politician employs these methods to conveyhis ideology in his political speeches consciously or subconsciously. Secondly, ideology andpower are hidden in the political speech. They are closely related to the political aims of thepolitician. The relation between ideology, power, and language is a mutual one. Thirdly,critical awareness can help people reveal the meaning of discourse in a deeper level.Therefore, critical awareness should be given much more attention both in CDAand in otherrelevantfields.