Critical Discourse Analysis Of The First Obama-McCain Presidential Debate

The purpose of Critical Discourse Analysis is to reveal the ideological information hidden in public discourse as well as the relationship between discourse and ideology. Critical linguist Fairclough holds that language as a social practice reflects reality from every angle and then influences and manipulates social structures in terms of hidden ideology and power relations. In the social-cultural environment, there is a dialectical relationship between language, power and ideology.Some linguists find that in political discourse, the speakers prefer to use all kinds of linguistic devices subtly and craftily so as to influence or manipulate the ideology of the audience. The election of the U.S. Presidents has always been the significant event in American politics.2008 U.S. Presidential Debate started at a time when the global financial crisis had greatly influenced American economy as well as its people's faith in the government, making the election especially attractive to people all over the world. In this thesis, the author analyzes the first Obama-McCain presidential debate from the perspective of CDA, aiming to uncover the political intentions and ideological information hidden in the discourse, the relationships between discourse and ideology.In this thesis, the author mainly applies Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of CDA and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. Fairclough regards language as social practice; he thinks that any discourse is composed of three dimensions:text, discursive practice (process of interaction) and social practice. Fairclough holds that the analysis of a text should be linked up with the analysis of the process of production of the text as well as the analysis of the social context. Based on this, he puts forward three stages of Critical Discourse Analysis:description, refers to the description of the formal features of language in a text; interpretation, refers to the stage to interpret the relationship between the text and the process of interaction in which the text is produced, distributed and consumed; explanation, refers to the stage to the explanation of the relationship between the processes of interaction and social context. The view that language is regarded as a multi-functional system is mainly from the theory of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. Halliday believes that language has to meet the user's three needs:express the experience of both the real world and the inner world; reflect the social and personal relations; produce a text. And this is the well-known three metafunctions of language: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.In the first stage of description, this thesis mainly adopts Systemic Functional Grammar to analyze the formal features of the debate from six aspects:vocabulary, transitivity, and transformation, representing ideational function; personal pronouns, modal auxiliary verbs and modes of sentence, which fulfills interpersonal function; thematic choice, realizing textual function. In the interpretation stage, the author focuses on the following four questions:what's going on, who's involved, what relationships are at issue, and what's the role of language in what's going on? In the last stage, the author discusses the social and historical environment, current political and economic situation both in and outside America, through an in-depth analysis of various kinds of language skills in the debate so as to reveal the complex relationships between discourse, ideology and social structures as well as how ruling classes use language to control ideology and maintain one's power.To explore the language features and interpret the production of a text is to find out the relationship between the discourse and social factors of the discourse. And this is just the final purpose of CD A, which seeks to help people to better understand the language use and its functions. Political discourse, as a powerful tool, can be used to realize their political purposes. Therefore, we should not only concentrate on the language itself, but also required to take account of the social factors such as ideology, the relationship between language and power, inside and outside environment, international relations and so on when analyzing political discourse. This thesis is consisted of five chapters. Chapter I gives a brief introduction to the research background, the object and the significance of the present study, and the organization of this thesis. Chapter II briefly discusses the general statement and principles of CD A, the relationships between language, power and ideology, and gives a systematic introduction of the research about CDA at home and abroad. Fowler and Kress made great contributions in the early stage of CDA while Fariclough's three-dimensional framework is the most famous research theory in the field of CDA. Chen Zhongzhu and Xin Bin made great contributions to the development of CDA at home. Chapter III explores the research methodologies, including Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. Chapter IV, as the crucial part of this thesis, systematically analyzes and discusses the first U.S. Presidential Debate on the bases of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of CDA and Halliday's SFG The last chapter is a conclusion of the research, which reveals and sums up the findings and implications of this study. And the limitations of the study and speculations for the future study are also stated.The use of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar to make critical analysis of the first Obama-McCain presidential debate will not only help to improve people's language awareness, cultivate and enhance readers'critical reading ability, but also benefit them in English writing and reading.