The Discursive Construction And Salience Of Multiple Identity

Identity is a dynamic and constructing process. Different situations and different targetsresult in different discursive representations and different discursive salience. The speechesgiven by national leaders are an important way to construct national identity relating toforeign issues. America as the unique super power in the21stcentury has paid a lot ofattention to building and propagandizing American national image. So this thesis focuseson the study of the methods that Obama uses to construct national identity in his politicalspeeches. Because of the importance in geopolitics and abundant oil resources, MiddleEast has been an area of intensive international disputes and in their settlement, USAalways tries to play a decisive role. So this thesis, by choosing Obama’s eight speeches onfour Middle East nations (namely, Egypt, Libya, Israel and Tunisia) as the analytic objects,tries to analyze methods that Obama uses to construct national identity.According to the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this thesis chooses Obama’sspeeches on the Middle East (eight speeches from the above four nations) issues as theanalysis data to systematically study the construction and salience of American nationalidentity, and the relation among discourse, identity and ideology from the perspective ofnational identity, especially discursive identity. According to the ideational, interpersonaland textual meta-functions from Halliday’s Functional Grammar, the author describes andanalyzes the construction and salience of American national identity in the chosen data,then analyzes the producing process of the discourse and tries to explore the inter-relationbetween discourse and ideology. The data are analyzed from transitivity and personalpronouns aspects. This thesis can help readers to comprehend how discourse transmitsideology, and offer a new research perspective to the study of the Middle East issues.From the analysis of the data, this thesis finds that Obama mainly uses transitivity,personal pronouns and degree adverbs to construct national identity. Obama tires toconstruct America as a responsible nation by using material process, as a friend by using relational process and as an opmistic nation by using mental process. He tries to constructAmerica as a democratic nation which is a member of the whole world by using personalpronouns. He also tries to construct a nation which hates violence and loves peace by usingdegree adverbs.