An Analysis Of The Communicative Intention Of The American Political Discourse During Iraq War From The Speech Acts Perspective

As an important communicative tool, language can serve to represent the world by various speech acts. By language, people are capable of expressing the complex world and making it clear and ordered. The use of language is not arbitrary, but every speech act carries the communicative intention which can be realized by the change of language use. Since the1980s, study on the role of language in social construction has attracted more and more attention of linguists.In general, these studies claimed that language is not only a medium of communication but also can do things and construct social facts in political context. With the increase of international communication, it becomes more and more important for political subjects to recognize the role of language in social construction, for a proper use of language may contribute to better diplomatic relations. A deep study on the role of language in social construction can help to better understand complex phenomena in international politics; besides, it can offer a significant guidance for foreign policy makers when facing crises. So this thesis takes the American political discourse during the Iraq War as study material and analyzes them with specific modes to examine how the speaker, as a political subject, uses language to construct the reality and to deliver his communicative intention to serve certain political goals.This thesis is composed of five chapters. In the first chapter, a general introduction is made to the study, including aims and significance of the study and the overall structure of this thesis. Chapter Two is literature review. In this part, definitions of communicative intention (CI) and political discourse are given. In addition, the speech acts theory is explained to serve as theoretical foundation for the study. The subsequent review of previous studies presents what research has been made related to this topic. Chapter Three first introduces the research questions and the way to collect data. After that, specific analysis modes are proposed to examine how language conveys the speaker’s CI in political context. The proposed analysis modes are at three levels:textual, syntactic and lexical. At textual level, the speaker keeps some content in the meaning system while excluding the others. At the lexical level, words as the smallest units construct identity and explain context. At syntactic level, the speaker achieves construction by different illocutionary acts and sentence patterns. Chapter Four involves the analysis of the specific discourses. The discourses are grouped by different periods of the war:the pre-war period, the period at war, and the late period. At each level, speeches of the three periods are analyzed respectively to see how the speaker delivered his CI in each period to make the hearers accept the identities, policies, meaning systems, etc he has constructed. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis. The research questions are answered, and implication of the study is also pointed out. Meanwhile, the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed.