Comparative Study Of American Presidential Speeches From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Political speeches, especially inaugural speeches, which accentuate the relationshipbetween politic, language and power, are paid attention to by linguists. This thesis comparesinaugural speeches delivered by Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan from the perspective ofcritical discourse analysis. By revealing the hidden relationship between language andideology in the presidential speeches, this thesis aims to uncover how the language producersuse language to convey their ideology to other people.Critical discourse analysis has been widely applied by many linguists to analyze politicalspeeches, which discloses power abuse and mind control in social and political contextthrough the study of discourse. Critical Discourse analysts insists that discourse producersspeak in different way with different social identities and status during the process ofdiscourse production. On the other hand, discourse also influence the ideology, which lead todifferent people with different perceptions of the same social problem and phenomenon.Scholars from home and abroad do many researches about inaugural speeches, but few dealswith comparative studies from the perspective of CDA. In the light of Fairclough’sthree-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, this thesis focuses on acomparative study of two inaugural speeches, attempting to fill the vacancy of this field.According to Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, language has three meta-functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The author takes themeta-functions as the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The thesis reveals the relationshipbetween language and ideology through analyzing and comparing the two speeches by waysof transitivity system, transformation, mood, modality words and personal pronouns.The conclusion of this thesis which summarizes that both of the presidents achieve theirpolitical power by applying a multitude of language skills in their speeches. Their differentideologies result in the differences in their speeches.The study proves that critical discourse analysis is very useful and practical in the studyof presidential speeches, since it helps to cultivate people’s critical awareness and criticalthinking in reading, and improve people’s reading ability by allowing them to have a betterunderstanding of discourses, especially presidential speeches. The thesis also shows light toEnglish teaching practices.