A Critical Analysis Of The Discursive Strategies In Xi Jinping’s Speeches On The Chinese Dream And Obama’s Speeches On The American Dream

In this thesis, the Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA) is adopted to make a critical analysis of the use of the discursive strategies in Xi Jinping’s speeches on the Chinese dream and Obama’s speeches on the American dream. This study aims to help readers get a better understanding of the Chinese dream and the American dream,and the purposes of the speakers.This thesis takes Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA) as the theoretical framework. DHA is interdisciplinary and social problem-oriented, and also it pays attention to the historical context when interpreting discourses. It emphasizes to interpret texts from the perspective of five discursive strategies. Considering the features of the data, only the strategy of predication, the strategy of argumentation, the strategy of perspectivation and the strategy of intensification or mitigation are adopted in this thesis.The research data of this thesis are selected from the relevant speeches given by President Xi Jinping and President Obama. Totally 9 speeches are selected, with 5speeches on the Chinese dream and 4 speeches on the American dream. The author chooses 20 extracts from the above speeches. A comparative analysis is conducted to find the similarities and differences of the use of the discursive strategies in their speeches. Then the author further analyzes the causes for the similarities and differences.The present thesis aims to search answers for the following three research questions:(1)How are the discursive strategies employed in Xi Jinping’s speeches on the Chinese dream and Obama’s speeches on the American dream?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of strategies in their speeches?(3)What are the causes for the similarities and differences in their speeches?This research finds that, the similar political purposes of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and President Obama’s speeches and the similar features of the Chinese dream and the American dream cause some similarities in their use of discursive strategies. For example, both President Xi Jinping and President Obama use the toposof history and the topos of number to make their speeches convincing and the rhetorical devices such as parallelism is applied to intensify their stances, which can help people get a more comprehensive understanding of the Chinese dream or the American dream. They tend to choose the positive modifiers to convey their confidence. In their speeches, their points of view are expressed from different perspectives to make their viewpoints clear.But due to the different historical, cultural and social background of the Chinese dream and the American dream, there are also some differences in their use of discursive strategies. For example, President Xi Jinping uses the topos of culture to highlight the cultural background of the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics,while President Obama chooses the topos of fact to further prove his standpoint.President Xi Jinping applies parallelism to intensify his point of view, President Obama uses parallelism and the device of comparison to highlight the positive aspects and mitigate the sensitive issues such as racial discrimination in his speeches, in order to mitigate the differences in American society.This thesis bears some practical significance. Firstly, this study is helpful to improve readers’ critical awareness and cultivate their ability to interpret political speeches from a critical perspective. Secondly, a critical analysis of the political speeches can contribute to improving the readers’ public speech-making skills and communicative competence. Finally, the Discourse-Historical Approach applied in this thesis is applicable to English teaching.