An Exploration Of The Ideology Hidden Behind Languages

A political speech is one that the speaker, usually on behalf of a certain class, society, or party, makes to audiences on some important matters and relationships home and abroad. In the past, political speeches were mostly analyzed from the traditional sense of word, sentence or pragmatics, while the present study will conduct an analysis from the aspect of exploring the ideology hidden behind languages.The thesis is based on the analytic theories of Critical Linguistics (CL) and Appraisal Theory (AT) of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and is intended to analyze the different ideologies hidden in American President Bush's and Chinese President Hu's political speeches. These two speeches will be analyzed comparatively through CL's transitivity and classification theories and AT. The AT's attitude system is centered on in the analysis. The affect, judgement and appreciation of attitude system are presented through the comparative analysis of languages, which expose President Bush's and Hu's different attitudes to global problems and the analysis can reveal their ideologies convincingly. The findings of this study testify the effectiveness of CL's analytic theories and show that AT also can be a powerful tool for exploring the ideology hidden behind languages.