A Critical Discourse Analysis Of 2008 And 2012 US Presidential Debate

It is a long-standing tradition in the United States of America for presidential candidates to make public debates on Television. The debaters use language strategies subtly to persuade the audience and get support from voters. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, this thesis attempts to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the 2008 and 2012 US presidential debate during the election. It aims to reveal the important role that language plays in disseminating certain ideologies and establishing or maintaining certain social relations so as to help the audience better understand the hidden intention or purpose behind the words in such presidential debates.Critical discourse analysis is a fairly new approach to discourse analysis which is mainly based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and which is mainly concerned with the relationship between language, power and ideology. The thesis begins its analysis from Halliday's three metafunctions:ideational, interpersonal and textual. Ideational function involves transitivity analysis, interpersonal function involves mood and modality analysis, and textual function involves cohesion analysis.The corpora are selected from the 2008 and 2012 American presidential debates on TV. As a typically political discourse, the debate may well reflect the relationship between language, ideology and power. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, it is found that different candidates have their own choices on language and vocabulary strategies to permeate the ideology, power, as well as reveal the communicative intention behind the discourse. In the transitivity system, Obama likes to use material process than the other two candidates which make audience feel objective and trustworthy. In the mood analysis, the most predominant type of sentences is declarative, which is commonly used to provide information and make statements. In the modality analysis, median value should be properly chosen, making candidates' words sound comfortable and polite. And Obama makes good use of this regulation. Last, in the cohesion aspect, reference and conjunction work in the whole process of candidates'expressions.The critical discourse analysis of debate text is helpful to enhance people's critical thinking consciousness, as well as strengthen their independent judgement ability, to avoid the interference of others.