A Study Of Metadiscourse Use In The Weekly Address Of The US President Barack Obama

Metadiscourse, as a relatively new concept in discourse analysis, has receivedincreasing attention in recent years. It is believed that discourse generally conveystwo levels of meanings: primary discourse and metadiscourse. Different from primarydiscourse which contains propositional meaning, metadiscourse illuminates aspects ofa discourse as to how writers or speakers explicitly organize the discourse, signal theirattitude, take up positions, and align themselves with their readers or audience in aparticular context. Lots of empirical and theoretical researches on metadiscourse havebeen conducted by scholars both at home and abroad, most of which focus on writtendiscourses, especially on genres such as academic articles and newspapers. There hasbeen very little work on metadiscourse in the genre of political speeches to date.The theoretical framework and categories of metadiscourse adopted in thepresent study is proposed by Ken Hyland (2008), which distinguish interactive andinteractional types and further subcategories. Interactive metadiscourse includessubcategories of transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, codeglosses; interactional metadiscourse includes subcategories of hedges, boosters,attitude markers, self mention and engagement markers. This study aims to find outthe features of distribution patterns of metadiscourse use in Obama’s radio politicalspeeches and its pragmatic functions, and see how the political ideology behindinfluence on them.In order to achieve the goal, thirty radio political speeches addressed byAmerican President Barack Obama from the year2009to2011have been selectedrandomly as the corpus for this study. Several steps are followed to conduct the analysis of the corpus. First, the metadiscourse items are carefully identified andtagged according to Hyland’s (2008) schema of metadiscourse. Second, theoccurrences of each metadiscourse subcategory are counted. Third, the data areprocessed by calculating the gross total metadiscourse items, the total number ofitems in each category and subcategory, the item number per1000words, and also, itspercentage of total metadiscourse. Finally, statistical findings are presented.The results reveal that distinct features of metadiscourse use have emergedfrom the study. It has been found that the interactional metadiscourse has an evidentlypreponderance over the interactive metadiscourse. Among all the metadiscoursesubcategories, attitude markers and engagement markers are most frequentlyemployed followed by transitions, boosters and self mention; hedges and code glossesare used less; frame markers and evidentials are at least; and no endophoric markersare found in our data.With regard to the possible reasons leading to these features, the paper arguedthat metadiscourse use in Obama’s radio political speeches are due to certain politicalpurposes and are influenced by specific political ideology. The generalpolarized-characteristic ideology is reflected in the employment of metadiscourse. Tobetter illustrate, distinct functions of metadiscourse in Obama’s political speeches arefound and summarized in the study:(1) to project a positive image of Obama, or hisDemocrats colleagues;(2) to expose the faults of Republicans and other politicalopponents with various background so as to leave them a negative presentation toaudience;(3) to establish unchallengeable authority as a political leader;(4) to reducethe risk-taking responsibilities in the situation of offering critiques to opponents oroffering speculative judgment;(5) transfer President’s own will and views to audienceimperceptibly;(6) to promote cross-party consensus in emergency period;(7) to allowObama identify himself with American common people to draw rapport fromaudience;(8) to justify and promote political thoughts and practice of PresidentObama;(9) to evoke self-national glorification emotion. All these functions ofmetadiscourse used in Obama’s addresses are derived from and are the chain effectsof ideological polarization of politics. The research results of present study are expected to offer a morecomprehensive understanding of metadiscourse in the genre of English politicalspeeches and to gain some insightful idea of political ideology hold by AmericanPresident Barack Obama in his speeches.