| First put forward by Fowler et al. in 1970 s, critical discourse analysis(CDA) has become the most influential branch in the area of discursive analysis. The principal analytical strategy of CDA is studying the language features, relating certain social and historical background and explaining the contents of power and ideology hidden in discourses. Therefore, it is widely applied to the analysis of political discourse. Political discourse, especially political speech earns lots of attention. It is an important means for politicians to clarify political views and to gain support of the public. While the major function of political speech is to affect the public’s choice by convincing and controlling.The thesis conducts a critical analysis of Barack Obama’s six speeches on racial issues with the theoretical basis and researching method of Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Fairclough believes that discourse is the product of communication process. His discourse analytical strategy involves three steps: description, interpretation and explanation. Halliday regards language as a symbol system which conveys certain meanings in certain social and cultural background. Language delivers meta-functions with universal meaning,that is, ideational, interpersonal and textual function. This thesis firstly describes the language features and dissects language strategies Obama adopts in his speeches. Then, an interpretation is made by the numbers on the relationship between the text and its producer. At last power and ideology hidden in the speeches are explained with specific social and historical information, including how Obama expresses his view towards racial issues through the application of language.The corpora—Barack Obama’s speeches on racial issues—reflect the uniqueness of the thesis. Racial conflict between the white and the black is complex and sensitive for a long time in America. As a descendant of African Americans, Barack Obama’s success in the presidential campaign and election means more for Americans. His related speeches about that topic offer great reference value in exploring his view towards racial issues, digging out the attitude of the American ruling class concerning the issue and the future development of racial relationship in America.The result of corpora analysis shows that Obama’s speeches have powerful persuasiveness and fraudulence. Through applying transitivity, personal pronoun, modality etc in the speeches, power and ideology are embedded in the discourse, which are not easy to be found out. Obama prefers to use material process to convey the public the ideology that the problem of racism would exist for quite a long time and that it can be solved only by the co-effort of generations of the white and the black. Finally, the public will gradually accept his ideology, i.e. it is impossible to change the situation just depending on Obama himself. Obama mentions his own experiences many times by applying the first personal pronoun “I”. It not only wins him the sympathy from the white, but also offers the black an illusion that the American Dream could be realized. Besides, he uses many low modal auxiliaries like can, could and might so as to avoid certain racial conflict events in an uncertain attitude and to avoid mentioning measures about how he would do to change the situation. As the spokesman of ruling class, the final target of Obama is to make the public believe what he says, to gain the public’s support, to win the presidential election and finally to get interests for his party. It is not optimistic for both the current situation and future development of racism. Although his speeches are bursting with passion and inspiration, in fact, Obama just makes racial issues as a tool for him to gain power. |
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