| An important part of a military campaign is not only winning on the battlefield, but also winning the battle of minds. With this assumption, leaflets were deployed as a tactical weapon during nearly every war since WWI. During the recent war in Iraq over 33 million leaflets have been distributed by the US. As missives of threat, information, or persuasion, leaflets are a critical medium in the US military's Psychological Operations. As a crucial factor of modern war, leaflets have drawn numerous attentions of the researchers in the fields of psychology, communication, media, and warfare. But few researchers are found in the fields of linguistics. A leaflet is a written or pictorial message on a single sheet of paper. Language plays an essential role in carrying out the mission of leaflets. In this regard, an attempt of linguistic perspective of leaflets is inspired. A leaflet is supposed to be a skillful language product embodied with strong war appeals. With this in mind, the writer draws a concern of assessing how the war strategies and tactics of are constructed and embodied into the leaflets, with the general orientation toward the functions of language from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA).CDA is a new branch in linguistic analysis which aims to integrate language, language use with its ideological meaning. Its linguistic basis is Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG). Both CDA and SFG take language as a social practice. Language does not only reflect the world of society, but also formulate the world of society. This critical approach to discourse analysis typically concentrates on data like news reporting, political interviews, government documents that describe unequal encounters or embody manipulative strategies that seem neutral or natural to most people. This thesis is a tentative endeavor to put a focus on the leaflets dropped in Iraq during the recent war, which will be examined by establishing an analytic model and bring together a diverse range of linguistic features to see what the rhetorical link between language and war is, and how the language is used as a weapon.To construct the theoretical basis for the whole thesis, the writer first introduces the basic notion and theoretical basis for CDA, SFG, and corpus approach. Based on Halliday's SFG and Fairclogh's three-dimensional framework, a three-dimensional model of leaflet analysis and a small leaflet corpus are established for data analysis.Following the three stages of linguistic description, discursive interpretation and social explanation in the model, the data is examined in the leaflet corpus to explore the ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning of the target leaflets by applying these tools: transitivity, voice, mood, modality, theme and cohesion. The results show that in the case of recent Iraq war, US forces have a very strong intention to choose material processes, passive voices, imperative mood structures, median modal operators, verbal themes, and causal-conditional structures to claim appeals to surrender or abandon current military objectives, to produce the threat of imminent danger, to present the portrayal of American righteousness and the vilification of Saddam and his regime.The three main contributions of this study are reflected respectively on the findings and the theoretical and methodological aspects of this study. The first contribution is the exploration of how the war strategies are realized by the linguistic choices. The second one is the establishment of the three-dimensional model of leaflet analysis, which is proved to be a useful tool for leaflets analysis. The third is the corpus-driven quantitative approach, which enables us to examine leaflets as a whole.Several methodological, theoretical and practical implications of this study are expected for the PLA are: (i) to explore enemy's war strategies by applying the analytic model, (ii) to take linguistic aspects into account in leaflet operation, (iii) and to interpret enemy's leaflets critically.
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