A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Political Discourse

Based on Critical Discourse Analysis and its relevant theories, this paper aims toinvestigate the differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning as embodied inreporting political discourses. In order for a descriptive analysis to be conducted with acombination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the present research built a corpuswhich consists of both the State of the Union Address of America (SUAs) and the Englishversion of Government Work Report of China (GWRs). In order to find out howinterpersonal meaning is realized in the political texts concerned, investigation isconducted from the dimensions of mood, modality, grammatical metaphor, personpronouns, reported speech and lexical classification. The objective of the study lies in therevelation of how diverse realizations of the interpersonal meaning become the agenda ofthe different political regimes, hidden power relations as well as ideologies in the two setsof discourses which appear to share similar nature in genre.The study shows that interpersonal meaning demonstrates a more explicit appearancein SUAs than that in GWRs. Specifically, this explicitness are mainly reflected in thefollowing aspects:1) SUAs apply diversified types of mood other than declaratives, whichis the predominant mood in GWRs.2) while both sets of texts adopt primarily modalverbs with median value, SUAs carry a higher percentage of modal verbs with high andlow value than GWRs do. Unlike GWRs, SUAs resort to a frequent use of grammaticalmetaphors to emphasize the speaker’s subjective orientation.3) While both sets of textsmake predominant use of WE, SUAs also rely on the use of a large number of personpronouns like I and YOU, which GWRs rarely do.4) While frequent manipulation ofreported speech, especially direct speech, is found in the SUAs, seldom is this in GWRs.5)While SUAs texts are inclined to the lexical category with emphasis on the notion ofnation, the factor of person as well as the speaker’s status, GWRs tend to emphasizeobjective entities and their development.The fore-going finding may lead to the following conclusions. On the one hand, theexplicitness of the interpersonal meaning as shown in SUA can be attributed to its balanceof power involved in its “tripartite” political system. On the other hand, what underlies thedifferences in the realization of interpersonal meaning are fundamentally the differences intheir hidden power relations and ideology of the two systems. It is expected that this study could throw some light on how to help raise the awareness of the language learners andreaders to critical awareness.