A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Main Characters In The "Playing House" Of American Drama

Critical discourse analysis is a developed method of discourse analysis which was first proposed by western linguist Fowler in late 1970 s. It aims at revealing the relationship between language, power and ideology through the surface of language forms. Based on the House of Cards, a political drama as the corpus, this paper does a critically analysis towards the hero’s dialogue combining Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis model with Halliday’s meta-functional grammar. First of all, this paper describes the vocabulary and sentence characteristics. Secondly this paper explores the character dialogue through three aspects, the conceptual function, interpersonal function and textual function. It aims at explaining how the hero’s language serves the communicative purpose. Then this paper interprets the hero’s speech controlling ways and strategies from the social perspective in specific context. Finally, by using the theories and methods of critical discourse analysis to analyze the TV drama, this paper is to enrich the theory’s social practice, increase the audiences’ sensitivity for language and to improve the audiences’ critical ability at the entertainment time. Hope this paper can help audience find the ideology and power relations hidden behind the language.