Analysis Of Political Discourse From Perspective Of Argumentation Theory

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), also called critical linguistics, is a new branch of modern linguistics. It serves to reveal the relationships among language, human mind and society. It has become an important tool in revealing social phenomenon.Given the interdisciplinary nature of CDA, Isabela Fairclough and Norman Fairclough have developed a new analytical framework of the synthesis between CDA with argumentation theory when they are conducting political discourse analysis. Argumentation theory studies how an agent supports his/her claim to win the support from others. Based on those theoretical foundations, this thesis aims at answering the following two questions when analyzing Obama’ speech on homeland security:1) to what extent is Obama trying to manipulate his audience?2) what ideology (ideologies) does Obama attempt to impose?The research object consists of three parts:1) a general introduction of the whole speech;2) Obama’s argumentation on closing the Guantanamo prison;3) Obama’s argumentation on how to strive for a balance between national security and transparency. The analysis of the thesis consists of two steps:1) to deconstruct and then to reconstruct the argumentative discourse;2) to evaluate the reconstructed argumentation from three different perspectives, namely, logical perspective, dialectical perspective and rhetorical perspective.The results of the research are:1) argumentative theory provides CDA with a new perspective to examine power and ideology and thus enhances the critique capability of CDA and enriches the optional tools of conducting CDA researches;2) judging from the overall dialectical insufficiency and rhetorical abundance of his speech, Obama has an obvious inclination to manipulate the audience;3) the ideology that Obama is trying to impose is that:the anti-terrorism policies of Bush’s administration are not in the interests of American people and on this ground, he is also trying to construct his identity of righting the wrongs so as to enhance his political legitimacy.The theoretical significance of the present research is:it proves the utility of Fairclough and Fairclough’analytical framework by applying it to the analysis of Obama’s speech, further indicating the effectiveness of argumentation theory in CDA researches. Pedagogically, it is supposed to be helpful to learners with their English writings, especially in writing an argument, since it introduces some knowledge about Western logics.