A Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Obama’s Address On The Way Forward In Afghanistan

Since1970s. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been widely used by western linguists to disclose ideology embedded in various discourse. CDA combines the discourse’s language analysis with the social analysis organically. By analyzing the features of the discourse in aspects of language form and structure,CDA explores the ideological meaning hiding in it to reveal the relationship between language, power and ideology. CDA draws a lot on the theory of Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar. According to Halliday. language is a system network made up of subsystems for option. The need of the society and the intentions of the language user determine the choice of the linguistic system.This paper tries to analyze Obama’s address On the Way Forward in Afghanistan by combing the linguistic features of political discourse and social features of the withdrawal.The purpose of the analysis is, on the one hand, to expose the relationship among language, ideology and power hidden in this political address, and on the other hand,to represent how language producers use language to convey their ideological assumption to others and exercises the power to achieve political purposes.In methodology, the paper follows Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, i.e., description, interpretation and explanation.In this framework, the first stage is to describe the linguistic features of the language about Obama’s address, employing Halliday’s systematic functional grammar (hereafter, SFG), which includes ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The second stage, based on the first stage, interprets in detail how these linguistic features are produced and presented. The third stage explores the relationships between language, ideology and power in association with the consideration of relative social context.Although politicians attempt to emphasize the objectivity and rationality of what they have claimed, the addresses can not avoid being influenced by the politicians’ ideological tendency and standpoint. These tendency and standpoint appear in discourses without being noticed by means of classification, transitivity, transformation, mood, modality, etc. So, political discourses are in some degree persuasive and veiled in the perspective of CDA. It is important for the audience to raise their CDA awareness so that they can understand the hidden information in political discourses better.The paper is characterized by topicality and timeliness. In general, a president’s TV addresses are filled with essential ideologies and represent a strong sense of state power implicitly. The critical study of Obama’s TV address about the Afghanistan issue helps us to study the problem in this country.