The Study Of President Obama’s State Of Union Address(2009-2014):a Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

In the concept of Systemic-Functional Grammar, language, as a social cultural symbol,can reflect other symbols, so the study of language also has the communicative sense. In the late 1980 s and 1990 s, Critical Discourse Analysis provides a new perspective for discourse analysis, as a kind of “social” analytical method. It is more likely to look at issues and events from a critical perspective; hope to find out the relationships between the discourse, society and ideology, and to explore the impact of social and ideological discourse purposes.Most of previous CDA studies tended to discover the relationship between language and the power, ideology by analyzing the news discourse. Comparing with news discourse, political discourse can express politicians’ ideology more obvious. Through the study on State of the Union Addresses presented by Obama, the thesis discovers the relationship between discourse and society, and proves the feasibility of combining with the Systematic-Functional Grammar and Three-Dimensional analysis model during the critical study on discourse.State of the Union Address is a representative form of political discourse, so this paper examines the interactional relations among the political discourse and ideology, and society through the CDA study on American incumbent President Obama’s State of Union Address from 2009 to 2014. The whole process of discussion also explains: 1) the ways that Obama expressed his views and own ideology through words and sentences; 2) and the means and methods that Obama used to realize to maintain the connections with the hearers through his social statues and power.By the study of CDA, we can also find that in terms of political discourse, the speaker are still effected by their own social and political status, as well as their ideological influence, although they tried to show their objectivity and neutrality while describing the politics. Therefore, we are able to spy on the speakers’ ideological and political views in discourse by having the CDA study in discourse. In the process of discourse analysis, CDA reveals the relationship between the discourses and ideology, society, and help people have a better mind on political speeches, public documents from the social and ideological perspective.