A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Critical Discourse analysts insist that discourse reproduces social reality, structures and organization and reflects that speakers will speak in a specific way with different social identities and status during the process of discourse production. On the other hand, discourse also has an impact on the ideology, which must lead to diverse perspectives of social problems and phenomena from people and make the society unfair. And CDA aims at analyzing the ways of power abuse and mind control in social and political context or discursive practice and reproducing the social inequality and other social problems, like racism, etc. through discourse.For this purpose, the thesis will do a critical discourse analysis of partially American presidential inaugural address in the application of theories and perspectives of CDA, aiming at revealing the ideology, values, and opinions and perspectives on social problems.The thesis mainly employs three-dimensional theory of Fairclough (text, discourse practice and socio-cultural practice) to analyze the text, discourse practice and social practice of the speech and multidisciplinary methods of discourse analysis. As a result, (1) Analysis of text mainly employs the topicalization within the Frame theory, which means that how the content of the text is presented and the sort of perspectives or angle the writer is taking, as well as foregrounding the concepts and issues. Also, equally important to the analysis are the background knowledge, assumptions, attitudes and viewpoints that the text presupposed. (2) On aspect of discourse practice, Halliday's Modality theory will be applied to do analysis of attitudes held by discourse producer, which also discuss the ways how the perspectives are supposed and compare the semantic meaning of each modal sentence by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. (3) Steps of Bhatia's genre analysis are employed into socio-cultural practice. Firstly, it defines particular genre, and then makes sure the issues and purposes according to the speaker of the text, the audience of the discourse, and their relationship with each other. Secondly, it selects the collection of texts to do critical discourse analysis.Based on the analysis above, the thesis explores that social structure has an influence on textual formation, and so does the text, as a social practice, on the social reality. Meanwhile it reveals that the normal or so-called scientific viewpoints accepted by the public are actually the consequences of power abuse of group interest and the mind control on people with the purpose of realizing the ideologies of powerful discourse producer. Therefore, to some extent, it strengthens the critical awareness of people for reading literature and promotes the anti-mind control capacity of readers.