A Metadiscursive Analysis Of Obama’s Presidential Campaign Speeches

Political speech is used to make a speaker’s stance clear, clarify his opinions andadvocate a specific assertion according to the national affairs and foreign relations. Inorder to achieve the purpose of speech, speakers need to employ different linguisticresources to affect their hearers’ attitude, so metadiscourse is such an important devicefrequently used in political speeches. Metadiscourse mainly covers modality systemand indicates particular rhetorical choices in delivering speeches. As a kind ofdiscourse, speech is mostly studied under the framework of Critical DiscourseAnalysis (CDA) to investigate discourse effect in society and to reveal the complexrelationship between language, power and ideology.Based on Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse, and Fairclough’s frameworkof CDA, this thesis focuses on how interactional metadiscourse is used in Obama’spresidential campaign speeches in2008and2012to fulfill different interpersonalfunctions, and interpret how such factors as speaking purpose, social ideology, speakerrole and cultural values affect the choice of modality markers. The result of the studyconfirms the assumption that different modality expressions are closely related to themultiple goals in interpersonal communication and aim at building a closeinterpersonal relationship between the speaker and his audience. The study is intendedto help English learners better understand different effects made by differentmetadiscourse expressions, strengthen their language awareness, improve their abilityof writing and public speaking, and meanwhile help with Chinese-English speechtranslation.