A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Obama's General Debates On Sessions Of The UN General Assembly From The Perspective Of Transitivity

In recent years,the ideological st udy of public speeches has gradually becom e the focus of linguists.Since 1980 s,Critical Discourse Analysis has been widely applied to explore the power relation and ideology under the semiotics,reflect social practice,construct speaker's identities and generate actions.As an ef fective tool to make the critic al analysis,transitivity modifies the ideational function in Systemic-Functional grammar.This study focuses on Obama's general debates on the UN Assembly to make a critical analysis from transitivity,aiming at coping with three questions:(1)How is transitivity system realized and distributed in Obam a's general debates?(2)What kinds of power and iden tity are constructed by transitivity system in Obama's general d ebates?(3)W hat is the ideological m eaning reflected in the construction of power and identity by means of transitivity system?To solve the problem,this study c hooses Obama's eight general debates from 2009 to 2016,and adopts quantitative and qua litative research m ethods to m ake a critical analysis with tr ansitivity in SFL as th e theoretical framework.Qualitative methods is mainly used to identify the realizing categories of transitivity system in the general debates.Quantitative method is applied to collect the di stributive data.Then,this study explores the construction of power an identity based on the transitivity in Obama's debates.Finally,this study tries to rev eal the ideological meaning reflected by the construction of power and identity.The research has drawn three research findings.Firstly,as for the realization and distribution of transitivity system,six transitivity processes are all adopted in Obama's general debates,including m aterial process(46.55%),relational process(26.24%),mental process(17.65%),verbal process(6.05%),existential process(2.98%)and behavioral process(0.53%).Secondly,as for the constructive m echanism of powe r and identity,the transitivity in Obam a's debates construes two kinds of power and identity.Power consists of personal power and national power;identity is com posed of role-based identity and group-based identity.Based on the corpus,the study has found that identity can be further divided into eight types.Role-based identity consists of the defender agains t terrorists,the leader of Democratic Party,the author ity of world affair and the maintainer of world peace.While,group-based identity concerns about religious group,hum anitarian group,non-nuclear group and non-war group.Lastly,as for the ideological m eaning,power and identity are connected with each other to highlight Obam a's ideological m eaning,that is attem pting to draw allied countries to American side and cope with th e conflict with hostile countries,so as to establish a dominant international image.This study has explored the transitivity system in Obama's general debates to reveal his stance on foreign policy from the construction of power and identity,which can be a beneficial supplement for the critical study of political di scourse.Besides,it can help readers grasp s peakers' political intention and develop their critical reading awareness.