A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Speeches Given By David Cameron For Begging Scotland’s Stay

Critical discourse analysis(CDA), also called Critical Linguistics, is a new branch of Linguistics, which is deeply influenced by Sociology, Psychology and Cognitive Study. Therefore, it is different from the traditional textual analysis which emphasizes the description of language features in that CDA paves a new way for discourse analysis by taking the social context and people’s cognition into consideration. Through analyzing the language features, the social-historical background of discourse and the cognition of the reader and listener, the ideology hidden in the language structure can be discovered and the complex relation between language, power and ideology can be unveiled.The theory of CDA is based on Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. In Halliday’s opinion, a discourse is the result of a choice the speaker makes between language form and meaning, and the language form the speaker chooses can reflect the speaker’s intention. Fairclough interpreted discourse from its relation with social practice. He put forward that discourse is not only language but also a part of social practice decided by social structure. Thus, he insists that discourse can be analyzed from three levels, that is, text, discourse practice and social practice. Based on the three levels, the discourse can be analyzed by three steps: description, interpretation and explanation, namely, the three-dimensional model of discourse analysis.The author analyzes two speeches given by David Cameron by combining the Systemic-functional Grammar with Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. The analysis of the speeches can be divided into three parts: the linguistic features descriptive stage; the textual interpretive stage; the social context explanatory stage. On the descriptive stage, the language features of the speeches are described from ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function to demonstrate how Cameron realized his intention; on the second stage, the author interprets the process of production, distribution and consumption from the perspective of cognition; on the explanatory stage, the author explains how social practice decides the structure of discourse from Scotland’s history and current situation under the governing of the UK, and how the ideology in language affects through power.From the analysis, the author arrives at the conclusion that by the utilization of language strategies and the selection of language forms in the process of organizing the speeches, the speaker can transmit his ideology and persuade his listeners successfully. In Cameron’s speeches, material process and relational process are widely used to indicate the objective feature of the language, which actually hide the attitude of the speaker; the lexical classification makes the attitude of Cameron more explicit; the selection of mood, modality and personal pronouns in the speeches shorten the distance between the speaker and the listeners and lower the mental defense of the listeners; the organization of theme-rheme in the speeches reveal Cameron’s intention. Furthermore, the cognitive-contextual analysis of the speeches explains the strategy that Cameron has used to organize his speeches and the effect it creates in conveying ideology. The ideology in the language of political discourse is not easily discovered by the readers because of the application of language strategies, so the reader should cultivate the critical thought when reading to find the true intention of the speaker and the ideology the speaker intends to transmit.