A Study On The Interpersonal Function Of Political Discourse

The relationship between language and politics can be interpreted through analyzing political discourse, and attention has been paid to the relationship between political discourse and power by scholars. In a narrow sense, political discourse is understood as the speech act of politicians who arrive at the domination of power through speech acts, thus protecting their interests and their groups.The thesis, under the framework of critical discourse analysis and the tool of interpersonal function of language in Halliday's Functional Grammar, tries to make an analysis of President Bush's addresses to the Congress since his inauguration, displaying how power is realized and permeated in political discourse. Critical discourse analysts find that power and control can be manifested in discourse, and Halliday takes language as social semiotic which serves the social and personal needs, and speeches of politicians are treated as a genre of political discourse. The study on personal pronouns, simple present tense, mood adjuncts, comment adjuncts, modal verbs and speech act words demonstrates language's function of influencing and controlling people.Through analyzing President Bush's addresses to the Congress, the thesis displays that power is realized and permeated in the whole discourse. Bush defends his national and international policies and wins support from the Congress and the American people, and meanwhile, he transfers his responsibility for wrong policies to others; he attacks some leaders in the Middle East and diffuses the notion of value there; he expresses his love to USA and its people and holds the belief of superiority of liberty which wins the American people; he expresses the confidence to his administration, thus reassuring his people that his government is reliable. The realization and permeation of power distributes widely and multi-layered in the whole discourse, and the analysis of Bush's addresses to the Congress testifies the existence of permeation and power in political discourse.The study on the interpersonal function of political discourse improves our critical consciousness of language and lays theoretical foundations for language use.