A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Bush's Addresses On 9.11 Attacks

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) also called Critical Linguistics is aiming at exploring the relationships among language, ideology and power. CDA practitioners stress discourse is not merely the 'mirror of reality', but also a force of social practice. Critical discourse analysis is mainly to identify and analyze those ideological assumptions hidden in the text that have largely been taken for granted. This thesis conducts a critical analysis of American President Bush's addresses on 9.11 attacks to explore the hidden relationship between language and ideology in political discourse. It also aims to represent how the language producer uses language to convey his or her ideology to others and exercises the power to help achieving the political purposes.Critical discourse analysis is a socially directed application of linguistic analysis. The major methodological resource of CDA is systemic-functional linguistics. The systemic-functional linguist Halliday holds that the nature of language is closely related with the functions it has. The grammatical features of language are determined by the need of the society as well as the purposes of the language user. Therefore, Halliday's Functional Grammar can be regarded as one of the analytical tools of CDA.In this thesis, the author mainly applies Fairclough's three-dimension model to do the analysis that includes three phases: description, interpretation and explanation. During the first stage, the author uses Halliday's Functional Grammar to describe the formal features of the data in terms of the three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. And the second phase is to interpret how these linguistic features are produced and presented. It mainly discusses on three questions: 'what's going on', 'who's involved and in what relations' and 'what is the role of language in what's going on'. In the third phase, the author attempts to explore the social context and the relations of social power of the discourse with the purpose to explain why Bush delivered a series of speeches concerning 9.11 attacks.From the analysis, we have observed that the language in use is ideological. The formal features such as the use of transitivity, transformation, the moods of sentences, the modality, the pronoun are determined by the functions of language and the language producer's ideologies socially. The political discourse is so powerful to be used as a tool by politicians for political purposes. In the analysis of the collected data, it is proved that President Bush successfully handled the changing situation and convinced the audience to believe what he said and set up his authority and solidarity confronting different social situation. Therefore, when doing researches of the political discourse, we should not only focus on the language itself, but also take the social factors such as the ideology, power relations into consideration.In addition, the critical discourse analysis of Bush's speeches provides us a different perspective of discourse analysis. The methodology: Fairclough's three-dimension model and Halliday's Functional Grammar are applicable in critical discourse analysis. Furthermore, CDA is also helpful to increase people's ability of critical reading and cultivate their critical awareness in language.