A Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Obama’s Victory Speech And Inaugural Speech For Reelection

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has now been one of the most influential research perspectives. It aims to explore the relationship between language, power and ideology. Compared with traditional analytic methods, CDA is more systematic and overall because it takes the social context into account other than the linguistic features analysis. Besides, CDA is applied to various texts, such as news reports, political texts and so on. Political discourses are usually produced under a certain social conditions. They are good choices to conduct a research based on CDA to explore the unaware social effects on the discourse production. Therefore, the thesis adopts CDA to analyze the political speeches in order to figure out the relationship between language and ideology.In the research, qualitative and quantitative methods are combined to analyze the discourses. During the data analysis in the three metafunctions, the quantitative method is used to collect and analyze the data. While in the analysis of the relationship between language and interaction and social context, the qualitative analysis is adopted.The thesis focuses on analysis of President Obama’s victory speech and inaugural speech based on CDA. The analysis employs Fairclough’s Three-Dirnensional Framework as the theoretical framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytic tool for the language feature analysis. The analysis is divided into three stages, namely, description, interpretation and explanation. The description stage is carried out by using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, in which the linguistic features are analyzed in terms of three metafunctions of language. The interpretation and explanation are concerned with the relationship among language, interaction and social context. They are mainly the typical representation of a new perspective of CDA.As is known, Obama’s outstanding eloquence has played an important role in his victory of reelection in2012. Many people are curious about how he can make his speeches so successful. In general, taking Obama’s victory speech and inaugural speech as research materials, the author is engaged in the exploration of the ways that leads the success of the speeches. The thesis aims to figure out how the speaker achieves his political aims with the same skills in two speeches and convince and inspire the audience.To sum up, the thesis can prove that CDA is an effective analytic perspective for discourse analysis. It is beneficial for the language learners and researchers to improve their critical awareness in order to have a better understanding and make a more adequate analysis of the political discourses.