A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Obama's Speech On Urging The Recovery Plan

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) aims at exploring the relationships among language,ideology and power.Critical linguist Fairclough stresses that language as a social practice has effects upon social structures through hidden ideology and power relations.There is a dialectical relationship between language and society,for it is determined by the society,and also contributes to the social change.This thesis tentatively studies U.S.President Obama's opening remarks before his first press conference on urging the Congress to pass the recovery plan from the perspective of critical discourse analysis,exploring the relations among language,ideology and power so as to help the reader understand how the speaker realizes his purpose by linguistic devices,and what the social background and determinants these linguistic features are, so as to demonstrate how language influences the world.The three-dimensional discourse analysis framework by Fairclough is adopted in the study,which are the description of text features,interpretation of discourse practice and explanation of social practice.It is through the mediation of discourse practice between text and social practice that text analysis can uncover ideological meanings and power relations of discourse.In the first phase,the author applies Halliday's Functional Grammar to describe the formal features of the data in terms of the three metafunctions,namely ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function. In the second phase,the author studies how the linguistic features are produced and presented through answering the four questions,which are 'what's going on','who's involved and in what relations',and what is the role of language in what's going on'. And finally,the author contextualizes the data back into the social background so as to explain why Obama uses the language in that way and attempts to find out the consequences of his speech. The analysis further proves that language is ideological and manifesting power relations.The formal features such as the choice of vocabulary,transitivity,modality and different thematic structures are all determined by the functions of language and the language producer's ideology and social culture background.As the supreme authority, Obama attempts to convince the public and seek public support for his recovery plan in order to urge the Congress to pass the plan timely.