Persuasion In George Bush's Speech-From The Perspective Of CDA

Political discourse is noted for its attempt to persuade the audience, and the persuasive intension of the speaker or writer can be researchable through the language he employs. The present paper attempts to analyze persuasive pattern in George Bush's Fort Bragg speech from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.Within the theoretic framework of Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's functional approach toward modality, this present paper first investigates the linguistic features of the speech ranging from the organizational structures, personal pronouns, modal operators to rhetorical devices. Since persuasion is based on understanding, the author, by adopting van Dijk's notion of ideological square and mental models, interpretates from the point of view of the audience to show how persuasion is achieved by means of linguistic strategies. Lastly, larger social conditions are integrated to explain the interrelationship between the speech itself and social structures. To be specific, it is to find out how this speech is determined by power relations and what reproductive effects it can cumulatively have on those power relations.The results of the research indicate that wording, as well as the context and social structures must be taken into account in order to achieve persuasion in political speech.From the implication from CDA in this study, a CDA-based approach to teach reading in foreign language teaching is proposed, which might help improve students' ability of critical reading.