Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Bush's Second Inaugural Address

Critical discourse analysis, an analytic method springing up in late 1970s and early 1980s, mainly studies public discourses and non-literature discourses. It attaches great importance to analyzing production, transmission and reception of discourse under social and historical background. It aims to disclose relations among language, power and ideology. Its methodology is built on Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics. So this thesis adopts methods of systemic-functional linguistics to study President Bush's second-term inaugural address in order to reveal underlying ideology behind the address.The first chapter gives a general description of CDA, and then reviews its origin as well as development both in western countries and in China. So far, although Chinese scholars have made great progress in CDA, they still fall far behind than their western counterparts. At last, it introduces methods adopted in the following chapters.Critical discourse analysis takes advantage of context theory and metafunctions to probe into a discourse. So Chapter Two focuses on exploration of Bush's address from contextual point of view. Halliday inherited and developed Malinowshi's context theory into register theory and cultural context theory. Analyzing the three elements (field, tenor and mode) that constitute register theory displays that communication patterns and contents can be predicted; thence, language functions and semantic structure can be predicted, too. Cultural context refers to all the meanings expressed in a discourse in certain social and cultural background. Language constitutes discourse. Its use and process in which it is used demonstrate different thinking patterns, psychological and social characteristics as well as its users' many aspects.Chapter Three probes into Bush's address from the perspective of three metafunctions, that is, ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. Ideational function is realized through transitivity, which sorts out six different processes. Choosing different processes shows different significance culturally, politically and ideologically. Interpersonal function displays an addresser's many aspects such as identity, status, motivation etc. Modality, an essential way to realize interpersonal function, directly reflects an addresser's opinions. So it is an effective way to reveal the hidden ideology in a discourse. Thematic structure and themantization to demonstrate textual function presents us with distribution and development of information in a discourse, thus it is easy to judge the main concern of the discourse.This thesis intends to prove that CDA is an effective analytical method to discourse. In doing so, the hidden ideology can be disclosed. So it is hoped that this method will help improve people's critical awareness and strengthen their anti-control consciousness.