Critical Discourse Analysis Of Poliitcal Speech From The Socio-Cognitive Perspective

In today’s world, the communication or dialogue between countries or internal politicalgroups is more and more frequently and complicatedly. Political speech as an essentialmethod for the communication or the dialogue gets more attention from the researchers,especially linguists. The linguists use different theories and methods to study the language,structure, ideology of political speech, and then to discover the purpose of the speaker.Critical discourse analysis is a main method to research political speech, but in the past time,people only use Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensionalframework to critical analyze the political speech, few uses Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model.This thesis that takes Obama’s first inaugural address as a case studies how does thespeaker control the discourse and the control the recipients in the political speech by usingVan Dijk’ s social-cognitive models and theories. In this paper, the research methods arequantitative and qualitative, and qualitative is the main which includes description andexplanation.According to Van Dijk, cognition is a medium that links discourse and society, so hestresses that we should explain the social attribute showed by the discourse from the cognitiveperspective. His theories include three perspectives-discourse, cognition, society, so this paperalso researches from these three perspectives. First, at the discourse level or text level ofObama’s first inaugural address, this thesis researches how does Obama enact his power in hisaddress by using the tool-topic, rhetoric figures, lexicalization and ect, which can express hisor his group’s ideas. Second, the present study researches the social background and themental models of Obama and the recipients. By researching both Obama’s and the audiences’knowledge, opinions, attitudes and the consensus, try to find how does Obama control therecipients at the cognition level. Finally, this paper researches the social structure of Obama’sfirst inaugural address that includes identity, groups and group relations to find how doesObama controls the audiences from the social perspective.Generally speaking, taking the research of Obama’s first inaugural address as a case, itcan be summed up that how does the speaker enact his power in the political speech, and howdoes the speaker control the recipients from cognitive structure and social structure inpolitical speech.