A Critical Discourse Analysis On American State Of The Union Address

Critical Discourse Analysis(henceforth CDA)is concerned with the linguistic resource in discourse,for the purposes of revealing the ideology,power and unequal relationship behind it.Our study investigate the SUAs from the perspective of CDA,exploring the relationships between discourse and society and their interactions.Firstly,from a synchronic perspective,adopting Fairclough's three-dimensional framework,which includes text,discourse practice and social practice,our study conduct a critical analysis about the SUA of Obama in 2015.At the dimension of text,we analyze the linguistic features in SUA based on the tools of three metafunctions of Halliday,to reveal how Obama expresses his political views,persuading his audiences to accept his political views.At the dimension of discourse practice,the interaction between discourse and audience from the perspectives of discourse contents,discourse participants and their relationships,as well as the role of language in discourse is involved.At the dimension of social practice,we explore the relationships between social factors and linguistic features,to show how social factors influence the discourse construction and perception.Governments in different periods vary in political values or working concerns,and these can be reflected by word frequency.Secondly,from a diachronic perspective,we build three corpora of SUAs and the time span is about 90 years,from 1929 to 2016.By investigating the words with high-frequency in our selft-built corpora,we explore how discourse varies with society.Our findings further verify the relationships between language,power and ideology,and language varies with the society.Also,our findings deepen our understanding on how language is exploited by politicians to realize their political purposes.Additionally,the findings will be helpful for us to improve critical awareness and critical thinking.