The Corpus-based Discourse Analysis On Weekly Addresses By American President Barack Hussein Obama

Political discourse is a special kind of discourse, which involves discourse like speeches of politicians,policies, government deliberations, parliamentary debates, party programs etc. It is a genre of discoursedefined from social political aspects that contains the political view points of authors. The research objectsin this research is the transcribed discourses of weekly video addressed by American President Obama toAmerican common people, which is a special kind of political discourse as it has the characters of bothpolitical discourse and political speech. It is of great significance to do this research in that it is helpful inunderstanding the linguistic characters and the political viewpoints in this kind of discourse.Since raised in1950s, the modern discourse analysis theory has developed rapidly and become animportant branch of modern linguistics on the analysis of discourse. The discourse analysis methods aremainly based on the theories like systemic-function grammar, criticism linguistics, pragmatics, and speechact theory etc. Based on the qualitative analysis, the subjectivness of research is unavoidable, as the depthof research is chiefly determined by the language awareness of research conductors. This disadvantagecould be fixed up by the methodology of corpus linguistics, which is more objective emphasizing thestatistic and quantitative foundation of research. In this paper, the corpus-based discourse analysis isintroduced and applied in the process of research. Following the principle of building corpus, researcherintroduced a self-established CPOWA (Corpus of President Obama’s weekly addresses) into the research,and the research and analysis in this paper are all based on the observing and retrieving of the CPOWA, inorder to answer the following questions:(1)Are there any significant features of Obama’s addresses on words, phrases, cohesions? If there are, what are they?(2) By doing this analysis, are there some viewpoints of US government towards some special topicswhich could be obtained?In this research, the corpus-based method is introduced into the analyzing of discourse in observingthe special linguistic characters of discourses in the CPOWA from different language levels like vocabulary,cluster, sentence and cohesion. In the end, researcher summarizes the research results, the significance andthe limitation of the study.The theory and method of corpus-based discourse analysis is not mature, as it is mainly on the lexicallevel, and it is very necessary for the further study and improvement on the retrieving and analyzing softwares and theories.