Modality In Obama’s Speeches About The Health Care Reform

Critical discourse analysis has always been applied in the investigation of thepolitical discourse and the news discourse since its birth in the1970s, essentially aimingat exploring the obscure ideological meaning and power relations and the interrelationshipbetween language and social structure implicitly embedded in discourse. Theinterpersonal meaning in systemic functional grammar is a powerful research method toinvestigate the ideology from the discourse. As a part of the interpersonal meaning, themodality system that is generalized by Halliday offers a more specific access to study themodality features in the discourse.The present thesis adopts the approach of three-dimensional conception of discoursethat is advanced by Fairclough as one part of framework and the modality system whichgeneralized by Halliday as the other part, and then chooses the political speech of Obamaabout the health care reform as the research material to investigate how Obama conveyshis political thought and how the ideology of him is revealed from the analysis of themodality features of the speech. By analyzing the modality features of the speech and theinterpersonal meaning it reveals, the author attempts to get into the further level to findout the connection between the use of modality and the social practice. Meanwhile, theaim of the present thesis is to enrich the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis from themodality of the functional linguistics.The dimensional conception of Fairclough has three aspects, and they are: text,discoursive practice and social practice. The three-dimensional conception also has threeprocesses that respectively used to investigate each dimension: the description of the text,the interpretation of the discoursive practice and the explanation of the social practice.Based on the framework of Fairclough, the present thesis focuses on the investigation ofthe modality features of the speech, and the modality system analysis will be expandedfrom three aspects: modality types, modality values and modality orientations. By usingthe methods of quantitive and qualitive, the present thesis found out that Obama intendsto use a large number of inclinational modal operators to show his own potential and thegreat ability of the government in solving all the challenges. Meanwhile, he also inclines to reset the image of the government which was destroyed by the greatest economicdepression. In choosing different value modal operators, Obama mainly uses the highestproportion of the median value modal operator that shows his compromising attitude tothe audience; while the use of high value modal operator directly reveals his power as apresident to the audience. Besides, by mainly using implicit subjective orientation and asmall number of explicit subjective orientations, Obama conveys to the audience that he iswilling to take the responsibility for all what he has said and committed. In all, those threelevels of the modality system invisibly unveil the political attitude of Obama, furthermore,they come into a whole that serves for his political ideology.Even though there are several papers and thesis about the analysis of the presidentspeech in the perspective of CDA, the one that specifically analyze the modality featuresof his speech and the one with the topic of health care reform are few. Meanwhile, theapproach of critical discourse analysis in the angle of modality can help audiences tomaster the real intention of the political speaker, so it is worthwhile to study it.