The Power Asymmetry In Political Discourse

The present study, adopting critical discourse analysis as its analytic approach, analyzes the power asymmetry in President Bush's speeches on the Iraq War delivered from March 2003 to March 2006. The author of the thesis analyzes these speeches through the analysis of the ideational and interpersonal functions in the aspects of transitivity, transformation, lexical classification, modal auxiliary verbs, non-factual verbs and personal pronouns, and points out how President Bush manipulates his speeches to attain his political aims.This research may broaden our vision in the field of discourse analysis and divert people's attention from cohesion and coherence of discourse to the study of the relationship among language, power and ideology. It may also help people take a correct attitude towards the Western media, which is conducive to the improvement of their critical language awareness. This research may be used for reference in English teaching.