A Critical Study Of The Speeches Delivered By American Presidents-with The Theme Of War And Peace

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social equality. Critical Discourse Analysis aims to expose the relationship between discourse, power and ideologies.This thesis analyzes six speeches delivered by American Presidents in different historical periods. The study aims to discover the relationship between discourse, power and ideologies in political speeches. Based on Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional model for Critical Discourse the study follows Fairclough's three procedures for Critical Discourse Analysis: description, interpretation and explanation. The thesis adopts both the quality and quantity approaches to analyze the speeches on transitivity, modality, classification, transformation and presupposition.Through the analysis of these speeches in details the study concludes that although the speakers emphasize the subjectivity and justice of what they claim the speeches will be influenced by the power and ideologies of the speakers' side. In this way the political speeches are persuasive and deceiving. In the political discourse there is power and ideologies which can't be identified easily for the readers. Therefore, it is very necessary for the readers to set up the critical awareness so that they would not be deceived.This study is significant in the following aspects: First, the study can help the readers to set up the critical awareness and critical way of thinking in reading. Second, the study is instructive to the English learners and teachers. It is helpful for the English learners to improve their critical awareness in reading so that they can have a better understanding of what they read and improve their reading ability.