Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Regular Press Conferences During The Iraq War

Since the late 1970s, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has drawn great attention of western linguists, aiming at disclosing ideologies embedded in various discourse. As the basis of the social value system, ideologies infiltrate into every social aspect: economy, politics and military affairs. Studies on ideology,ideology at war times in particular, are of great significance in linguistic, educational and military practices. Nevertheless, ideology is abstract and can only be communicated and promoted through a certain channel: discourse. Among various types of discourse, media discourse and political discourse are the two most popular ones among linguistic analysts. Regular press conference, combining the features of both media and political discourses, is worthwhile to explore, but it has been overlooked in the scope of CDA.Generally speaking, mainstream empirical studies in CDA are qualitative ones, which have contributed a lot to the development of CDA but also led to some criticisms of being"fragmentary and exemplificatory"(Fowler, 1996). In response to such criticisms, a new trend of CDA of marrying Corpus Linguistics (CL) with CDA came into being. A survey on the existing limited literature indicates that this new trend has not prevailed and most empirical studies within this field confine themselves to the lexical level.Based on the literature review, the present study adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model (description, interpretation and explanation) as the overall guidance, incorporating into Van Dijk's socio-cognitive theory of Positive Us and Negative Them, Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as well as quantitative methods in CL to conduct a tentative critical discourse analysis of American regular press conferences (ARPC) during the Iraq War to answer the following questions: (1) What is the ideology embedded in ARPC during the Iraq War? (2) How is it realized and reinforced in ARPC? (3) Why do ARPC promote such ideology? In the process of answering the above questions, the paper also takes a closer look at what CL can offer for CDA.Remarks related to Iraq delivered by the White House spokesperson during the Iraq War are collected as the original data of the corpus. All the data are collected from the website http://www.whitehouse.gov, complied and annotated manually. Subsequently, the annotated corpus is processed by WordSmith 5.0 and some of the concordance results are further analyzed in SPSS 13.0. The main body of the thesis falls into two parts. The first part is the description and interpretation at the macro level and micro level. With the assistance of quantitative methods in CL, a series of wordlists is extracted and analyzed to provide an overview of the Iraq War in ARPC at the macro level. At the micro level, both the SFG and quantitative methods in CL are combined to examine the linguistic patterns used by the spokesman in terms of ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Considering the emphasis of ideology at war on"Us"and"Them", Van Djik's Negative Them and Positive Us theory is borrowed to interpret the results produced at both macro level and micro level from socio-cognitive perspective. The second part is explanation. It situates American regular press conferences in their underlying societal, institutional, and situational contexts to see how the ideology and ARPC reach a consensus in social contexts.Results and discussions show that (1) the ideology embedded in ARPC during the Iraq War is closely related to the images of the three participants of the Iraq War. In constructing the negative image of Saddam and positive images of the U.S. and Iraqi people, the Iraq War is inherently depicted as a self-defense war fighting for security, liberation and freedom. (2)Differences are found in terms of linguistic patterns used by the spokesman: The negative image of Saddam as"terrorist"and"dictator"is realized through frequent use of lexical classification, material process, relational process, declarative process and the modal verb"should"; the positive image of the U.S. as"Savior"and"Defender"is created by the frequent use of lexical classification, the four processes, declarative mood, the inclusive pronoun"we"and intertextuality; the victim image of Iraqis together with their positive relation with the U.S. is mainly built by lexical classification, mental and relational process, declarative mood,the modal verb"will"and passive voice. (3)The ideology embedded in ARPC takes deep roots in its societal contexts, institutional contexts and situational contexts. Language in ARPC functions as a mask to cover the real facts of the Iraq War and at the same time promotes the ideology of the White House to the audience to justify the war, gain their supports and realize its control over people.The contributions of the present study lie in that: it further demonstrates the fact that incorporating quantitative method in CL into CDA is applicable and feasible in enriching and strengthening CDA; it indicates the importance and significance of enhancing student's ability in critical thinking and cultivating their critical language awareness and suggests Critical Discourse Analysis is helpful in meeting the urgent need in English as Foreign Language (EFL) education; it makes a call of raising people's political and military awareness and sheds some light on the studies of psychological warfare and media warfare.