The Study Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Recently, discourse analysis gradually becomes a heated research method of linguistic analysis, which indicates that the public have got a deeper sense of language itself, and at the same time the power and ideology embodied in language have gradually been taken seriously. Due to its close relationship with power, political discourse, or political text has been a heated issue studied by CDA, including speeches and announcements delivered by politicians, slogans and posters by the press and election campaign members, interviews between the politicians and the journalists, etc..Through the analysis and comparison of documents and papers, this thesis studies the inaugural speeches delivered by George W. Bush and Barack Obama with the theory and points of Critical Discourse Analysis, for instance, the Modality System Theory of Halliday and Three-dimensional Analysis Theory of Fairclough, from the aspects of discourse, vocabulary, culture, and ideology and so on, that is the frequency of the nouns, prepositions and verbs, the collocation of long and short clauses and sentences, the adoption of figures of speech and the embodiment of ideology and power.After a detailed analysis of these two pieces of speech, similarities and differences have been found. The similarities are the incredible language ability and awesome delivering techniques, that is to adopt gerunds as attributes, objects, predicatives and adverbial modifiers, to use specific figures of speech and modal verbs, to balance the collocation of oral languages, clauses and sentences and to mention the vocabulary and events of religion and history. They differ in the specific selections. George W. Bush’s speech tends to adopt gerunds as adverbial modifiers, while Barack H. Obama’s speech prefers gerunds as attributes and objects. Bush’s has a higher frequency of "I", a smaller connotation of "you", and a higher adoption of modal verbs with high value. Besides, the parallelism within clauses and sentences are fewer in Bush’s speech, and more among paragraphs. All in all, these two pieces of speeches both give a fulfill expression of their thoughts and ideas within limited time and space to get a steady support from the audience. Moreover, they highlight their specific personal charming and characteristics, ideolody of freedom and power to build a strong connection and to earn a firm trust and faith of their administration and the nation’s bright future from the citizens.