A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Us Presidential Debate In 2008

Critical Linguistics (CL) was born in 1970s'which was first proposed in Language and Control (1979) written by British Linguists Fowler et al. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) emerged in the late 1980s. Norman Fairclough (1989) defined CDA in his book Language and Power for the first time. Since then, as a contemporary approach of discourse analysis, CDA has attracted more and more attention from various domains. It aims at exploring the implicit communicative intention of the speaker, the relationship between language, power and ideology in people's social communication by analyzing the surface structure of the utterance. CDA was widely adopted to reveal the inequality, sexism and other social problems in News discourse, Public discourse and so on. For example, Xin Bin (2006) applied CDA to a contrastive analysis of reporting and information sources between China Daily and New York Times, provided a clear explanation that language is affected and dominated by ideology and power relations of the speaker. However, applying CDA on the research of debates is relatively less. Therefore, this study focuses on presenting a critical discourse analysis of US Presidential Debate in 2008.The interdisciplinarity of CL leads the theoretical foundation of CDA into diversity. There are many approaches to CDA study, they focus on different aspects, but Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar has been invariably adopted in most critical discourse studies as their theoretical basis and research tool.This study choose the 2008 US Presidential Debate as research data, Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as theoretical foundation to analyze the realization of Ideational Metafunction and Interpersonal Metafunction in the discourse so as to uncover the hidden power and the dialectical relations among discourse, power and ideology under the surface structure of their language. The analysis of Ideational Metafunction consists of two parts, analyzing transitivity and transformation systems. Interpersonal Metafunction analysis is based on the research of modality, mood and pronoun systems in the debate. Through the extensive analysis, the study proves that language use is not arbitrary, the choice of language is ruled by the social roles and power relations as well as language users'ideology. For this, having a critical discourse study of the special political discourse– presidential debate is meaningful. By the comparison of their debate content and expression manners, the implications of their language are exposed, so are power relations and ideology.The author believes that, employing a critical discourse analysis of the 2008 US Presidential Debate through Metafunction system is significant. On the one hand, this study provides the readers with a clear vision about CDA, uncovers the real communicative intentions behind the discourse and proves the dialectical relations among language, power and ideology. On the other hand, this study improves English learners'ability of language and communication as well as the awareness of language functions in social life.