Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Kennedy's Inaugural Address

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) was developed by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress in the late 1970s and early 1980s.It takes as its objects of study news reports, public discourses,official documents and non-literature discourses.It attaches great importance to the analysis of production,transmission and reception of discourse under social and historical backgrounds,to reveal the relations among language,power, and ideology.The major methodological resource of CDA is Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics.In this regard,the present thesis adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model in CDA and systemic-functional linguistics to study President Kennedy's inaugural address in order to reveal its underlying ideology.It also aims to explore how the language producers use language to convey their ideology and exercise the power to help achieving the political purposes.Most of the chosen discourses for CDA analysis in China are news reports,the present author has nevertheless chosen public political speech.Based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG) and Fairclough's three-dimensional model in CDA,the present study develops a framework for understanding and analyzing the political discourse at two levels:textual and intertextual.To exemplify the function and effectiveness of the framework,the present author first uses SFG to describe the formal features of the data in terms of three metafunctions:description,interpretation and textual Then,the author interprets how these linguistic features are produced and presented.The questions in focus are:"Who is involved and in what relations?" "What is the role of language in what is going on?" In the third phase,the author explores the social context and the relations between social power and the discourse with the purpose to explain why Kennedy delivered such a speech.The current research intends to provide a different perspective of discourse analysis.It is hoped that the research findings will also produce pedagogical implications,providing language teachers and learners with a different perspective of analyzing language,thus helping them to develop a critical awareness in language and a realization of the ideological function embedded in language.