A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Obama’s Victory Speech In2012under The Appraisal Theory

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can date back to the late1970s, which comes into being on the basis of Critical Linguistics (CL) proposed by British linguist R. Fowler and some other scholars. As an emerging method of discourse analysis in recent years, with political discourses and news reports being its primary objects of study, CDA is mainly based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). It is aimed at uncovering the relations between language, its underlying ideology and power. Critical linguists claim that language itself is a kind of social practice and also promotes social practice to be realized in the process of reflecting the society.At present, most native scholars have been based on the three metafunctions of SFG to make critical discourse analysis of political speeches, while this thesis will apply the perspective of Appraisal Theory, an extension of interpersonal metafunction, to make a critical discourse analysis of presidential speech from its three subsystems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The Appraisal Theory gives priority to lexis rather than grammar in studying evaluative discourses, which further extends the study framework of interpersonal resources and makes the study more scientific and systematic. With Martin’s Appraisal Theory being the analyzing tool and American president Obama’s victory speech in2012being the corpus, a critical discourse analysis will be made in this thesis to explore the features and implications of the distribution of evaluative resources in this speech. Meanwhile, the analysis also aims at revealing how the speaker uses these linguistic resources to affect the listeners and finally ally himself with the audience.The purpose of CDA is to identify and analyze those ideologies hidden in the text that may have been widely taken for granted so as to help people reconsider these ideological elements. As a representative of the ruling class, Obama tries to deliver an effective speech to enjoy great popularity among his audience. His purpose is to convince the audience to accept his words and then gain support. This thesis attempts to make a critical discourse analysis of Obama’s victory speech to discuss the relations between language and ideology, to reveal the facts that how the speaker chooses language to spread his intentions and ideas to the audience and to make people realize how the national powers choose and use language to achieve their political purposes.With a unique analyzing perspective, this thesis testifies the validity of the Appraisal Theory in CDA. Meanwhile, this thesis is helpful to cultivate and improve people’s critical awareness and reading ability.