A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese Delegation' S Speech At The 112^th Ioc Session

The thesis is to study Chinese delegation'speech at the 112th IOC Session, held in Moscow on July 13, 2001 from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. The IOC is short for the International Olympic Committee. The 112th IOC Session has two main tasks. One is to select the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games and the other one is to elect a new IOC President. It is well known that Beijing won the competition. At the 112th IOC Session, Chinese delegation gave a speech made up of 9 small speeches. They are given by Mr. He Zhenliang, Mr. Li Lanqing, Mr. Liu Qi, Mr. Yuan Weimin, Mr. Lou Dapeng, Mr. Wang Wei, Ms Deng Yaping and Mr. Yang Ling(together), Ms. Yang Lan and Mr. He Zhengliang respectively. They are analyzed as a team.CDA, also called critical linguistics, originates from traditional schools of languages studies. It studies language, power and ideology in relation to each other. Critical linguists hold that discourse is not only objective reflection of realistic world, but also a kind of social practice. This thesis employs Fairclough's three dimensional framework of CDA to study the Chinese delegation's speech at three stages: description, interpretation and explanation trying to find out the hidden relationships between language and ideology in public speech and how speakers convey their views and attitude by language. In conclusion, several findings can be drawn from the present research. The findings reveal that Chinese delegation does pay great attention to the use of structure and the choice of wording. In addition, larger contextual and social aspects have something to do with the formation of this speech. CDA proves itself to be a useful instrumental discipline in studying public speeches. It also can be seen that CDA is helpful to increase people's ability of critical reading and raise people's awareness of critical analysis.