A Critical Analysis Of The Discursive Strategies In President Obama’s Speeches On Immigration

Immigration is a controversial issue in the United States. While immigrants are bringing a steady stream of labor, increasing illegal immigrants are becoming one of the major problems perplexing the American society. Amidst the rising calls for an immigration reform, Obama, the first African-American president, made a promise to carry out a comprehensive immigration reform during his presidential campaigns in 2008. After he took office, immigration reform has been the priority of his political agenda. However, due to the political division on immigration issues between the Democratic Party and Republican Party, the prospect of a comprehensive immigration reform is muddied. In China, the current studies of immigration have been concentrated on the politics and economy scopes. The issue has not attracted enough attention in the research field of linguistics.In order to make a diachronic study of Obama‘s speeches on immigration, the data of this thesis have a certain time span of seven years. The Discourse-Historical Approach and the Interpersonal Function Theory are adopted in this thesis as the theoretical framework. How discursive strategies are applied in Obama‘s speeches on immigration is studied. The construction of interpersonal relations and the underlying political purposes of using these discursive strategies are further explored to improve people‘s understanding of political speeches.The Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA) is proposed by Ruth Wodak and her colleagues based on a critical analysis of Austrian racial discrimination discourses. The approach is marked by the distinctive features of practicality, sensitivity to historical contexts, importance of text analysis and transdisciplinarity(Tian, 2009:154). DHA emphasizes a critical analysis of political discourses in their historical contexts to explore the use of discursive strategies(Xiang, 2013:106). It studies the use of five discursive strategies, namely the referential strategy or the strategy of nomination, the strategy of predication, the strategy of argumentation, the strategy of perspectivation, framing or discourse representation, and the strategy of intensification or mitigation. The Interpersonal Function Theory is complementary with the DHA in analyzing the discursive strategies, thus the author combines the DHA with the Interpersonal Function Theory as the theoretical framework of this study.The referential strategy or the strategy of nomination is a way of constructing and representing of social actors through rhetorical devices, including metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor, and social actors are divided into the ―in-group‖ or the ―out-group‖. The use of referential strategy or the strategy of nomination could shorten the distance between the speaker and the ―in-group‖ members. On the other hand, a negative representation of the ―out-group‖ members reflects the speaker‘s criticism of or discrimination against certain social actors.The strategy of predication is the discursive qualification of social actors more or less positively or negatively to show the speaker‘s attitude and evaluation. The strategy of argumentation is a way to justify the speaker‘s attitude and evaluation through different topoi. There are fifteen types of topoi, including ―usefulness/ advantage, uselessness/ disadvantage, definition or name-interpretation, danger and threat, humanitarianism, justice, responsibility, burdening/ weighting, finances, reality, numbers, law and right, history, culture, abuse‖(Wodak, 2001:74). The strategy of perspectivation, framing or discourse representation is to quote, narrate report or describe from different perspectives directly or indirectly so as to show the speaker‘s point of view and express involvement or distance. The strategy of intensification or mitigation is modifying the illocutionary force of utterances in respect of their epistemic or deontic status through such devices as modal particles, tag questions, subjunctives or vague expressions.This thesis gathers Obama‘s speeches on immigration in different periods and selects 20 examples from 6 speeches to conduct a detailed analysis. To guarantee the credibility and accuracy of the data, the political speeches made by Obama are all collected on the Website of the U.S Government. Based on data analysis, the author mainly aims to explore the following three research questions:(1) How are discursive strategies applied in Obama‘s speeches on immigration?(2) What kinds of interpersonal relations are constructed with these discursivestrategies?(3) What are the underlying political purposes of adopting these discursivestrategies?The study finds out that the positive construction of immigrants‘ images prevails among the selected speeches. Through the topos of usefulness/ advantage and the topos of history, Obama repeatedly emphasizes Ameirca‘s nature as an immigration country. He argues that immigrants are the ―root‖ of the country and strong impetus to the economy. He wants to win the American citizens‘ understanding and support in his immigration reform.The construction of other social actors reflected some differences in the use of discursive strategies. The author finds out that in his presidential campaigns and first two years in office, Obama often uses the referential strategy to strengthen the fact that he is an African-American, and a member of the immigration groups in order to win their votes and support. At the same time, Obama expresses his positive attitude towards the cooperation with the Republicans and the Congress to carry out a comprehensive immigration reform through the strategy of predication.During the middle and later periods of his administration, Obama delays the promotion of immigration reform due to the midterm election. He adopts the strategy of intensification or mitigation to criticize the political games in Washington, and Republican‘s obstruction of his proposals so as to shift the blame. After the failure in the midterm election, Obama passes the immigration reform as a presidential executive order to leave a political legacy for the Democratic Party. At this time, he mainly adopts the topoiof usefulness/ advantage, history, justice and threat to justify his actions. Through the strategy of perspectivation, he cites the scripture and former presidents‘ words to support his own behavior.The author holds the opinion that the discursive strategies are helpful to construct the interpersonal relations between Obama and his audience. Obama‘s personal background and life experiences give him a natural bond with the immigrants, and make him a bridge between the government and immigrants. He always holds a positive attitude towards immigrants, and constructed supportive, equal and cooperative relations with them.The growing number of immigrants, as well as their increasing influence in presidential elections, encourages the competition between the two parties to win their favor. Obama needs support from immigrant groups and other American citizens so as to break through the obstruction from the Republicans. Therefore, Obama changes his use of discursive strategies accordingly with the change of social and historical contexts so as to achieve his political aims as to maintain the coherence and flexibility of the policies, and to maintain his political party‘s advantage.The implications of the present study include the following aspects. Firstly, by applying the Discourse-Historical Approach to a critical analysis of Obama‘s political discourses, this thesis explores the use of discursive strategies and their effect on the audience. Thus, it could help people improve their understanding of political speeches.Secondly, the study of discursive strategies is contributive to English teaching. Appropriate application of discursive strategies could enhance students‘ reading and writing abilities. For example, the strategy of argumentation could be adopted in writing to make a strong argument and make the article more persuasive. The strategy of nomination and the strategy of predication may help students to infer the author‘s real intention in reading.Thirdly, the study is helpful to improve people‘s critical language awareness. Critical discourse analysis sees language as a social practice. Therefore, basic knowledge of the social and historical context is a premise to fully understand political speeches. The discursive strategies could help people find out the underlying political purposes in speeches more objectively.Due to the time limit and inadequate academic competence of the author, the thesis still has some limitations. Firstly, the study takes 20 examples from six speeches as the research data, but that‘s hardly enough to conduct a comprehensive diachronic study of Obama‘s speeches on immigration. Secondly, the Discourse-Historical Approach emphasizes the interdisciplinarity in a problem-oriented study. However, restricted by the author‘s academic competence, the present thesis only superficially studies the relevant fields of immigration issues and political speeches. Thirdly, although the author tried to keep a distance from the data and make an objective study, some subjective factors may not be fully avoided.Based on the above limitations, the author of this thesis would like to give some suggestions for further research. Firstly, future researchers could collect enrich the genres of the data, and extend the time span of data collection. Secondly, more approaches of critical discourse analysis could be adopted to conduct more in-depth studies. Thirdly, future researchers could apply the DHA to the study of Chinese discourses on immigration issues, and further localize the approach.