A Critical Discourse Analysis Of U.S. President Obama’s Weekly Radio Address

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is derived from critical Linguistics with the aim ofexploring the relationships among language, ideology and power. CDA practitioners stress thatthere is a dialectical relationship between language and the social context．Discourse is believedto be not only the ’mirror of reality’, but also a force of social practice．Critical discourse analysisis mainly to identify and analyze those ideological assumptions hidden in the text that may havelargely been taken for granted. The thesis conducts a critical analysis of American presidentObama’s weekly radio address to explore the relationship between language and ideology. It alsoaims to represent how the language producer uses language to convey his ideology to others andexercise the power to help to achieve the political purposes.Critical discourse analysis is a socially directed application of linguistic analysis.Themajor methodological resource of CDA is Systemic-functional linguistics. TheSystemic-functional linguist Halliday holds that the nature of language is closely related with thefunctions it have. The grammatical features of language are decided by the need of the society aswell as the purposes of the language user. Therefore, Halliday’s Functional Grammar can beregarded as one of the analytical tools of CDA.In this thesis, the author mainly apply Halliday’s Functional Grammar to analyze Obama’weekly radio address in2009and2010. It includes three steps: description, interpretation andexplanation. During the first step, the author uses Halliday’s Functional Grammar to describe theformal features of the data in terms of the three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonalfunction and textual function. And in the second step, it interprets how these linguistic featuresare produced and presented. In the third step, the author attempts to explore the social contextand social determinants of the discourse.From the analysis, we have observed that the language is ideological in nature. The formalfeatures such as the, transitivity, transformation, the modes of sentences，the modality, and thedifferent thematic structures are all determined by the functions of1anguage and the languageproducer’s social ideologies. The president Obama, the authority representative who isdominating the public aims to gain the audience’s support and let them believe all he said is inaccordance with the facts of the world.The language use of the politics is determined by the political purposes at certain time incertain social context. The textual features all contribute to the purpose of establishing solidarityand authority. Obama uses the speeches to construct the enemies of America and constantlyemphasizes that the United States as the super power of the world.The ideologies such asauthority,solidarity are reflected in the discourse, and in turn the discourse has helped toreinforce these ideologies. this shows me dialectical relationships between language and ideology. To explore the relationship between discourse and social factors of the discourse is tofind out how the discourse is produced like that and why the discourse is presented in that way.this is the final purpose of CDA which enables us understand the language more deeply andbetter. The political discourse which is very powerful can be used as a tool by politicians forpolitical purposes. Therefore, when doing researches of the political discourse, we should notonly focus on the language itself, but also take the social factors such as the ideology, power, theinternational relationships into consideration.The critical discourse analysis of Obama’ weekly radio address provides us a differentperspective of discourse analysis. The methodology of Halliday’s Functional Grammar areapplicable in critical discourse analysis．In addition, critical discourse analysis is also helpful toincrease people’s ability of critical reading and cultivate their critical awareness in language.