A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Obama’s 2009 And 2013 Inaugural Speeches

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become a very influential academic research activity across fields in social, political, linguistic and educational sciences. It focuses on the study of power relations, ideological manipulations, and hegemony. Inaugural address is the first formal presentation of a newly elected president. This paper attempts to investigate the discursive characteristics underlying the inaugural address. To this end, Obama’s first and second term inaugural addresses are selected to explore the potential ideologies signaled by these linguistic mechanisms.In this study, van Dijk’s (2004) framework adopted from "Politics, Ideology and Discourse" and Cheng’s (2006) way to analyze political language rhetoric are used to detect discursive structures which lead to ideologically based statements. The CDA of Obama’s first and second term inaugural addresses has put an emphasis on the fact that ideological manipulations can be expressed, formulate, confirm and inculcated through discourse structures. The macro strategies of positive self-representation and negative other-representation have proved to be very accurate criteria to evaluate attitudes and opinions. By contrast, the latter lays emphasis on rhetoric devices employed by president Obama in his two inaugural addresses and includes such rhetoric moves as identification, victimization, parallelism and so on.The results reveal that president Obama has access to a wide range of discursive strategies and rhetoric devices including lexical and semantic choices which enable him to represent his ideologies. He used these rhetorical strategies to present a positive image for the in-group; namely, Americans and his government. At the same time, he employed these rhetorical strategies to categorize America’s previous government into the out-group and made an attempt to present a negative picture to them. The results of CDA can be used to demystify the intricate relations between language, power and ideology.This research result will help to improve students’ ability of critical thinking in aspects of language comprehension and output, as well as the revitalization of neglected construction in terms of language proficiency.