A Study On Identity Construction In The State Of The Union Address From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term put forward by the French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s.From then,intertextuality has come into existence as an important research focus in literature theory and discourse analysis fields.This thesis aims to study intertextuality in American President William Clinton and Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address(SUA),explaining how intertextuality functions effectively in the identity construction process,and revealing how President Clinton and Obama successfully employ these intertextual strategies to deliver ideas,to win public’s support,and to achieve identity construction.Based on the theoretical framework proposed by Hatim&Mason,and further coined by Weng,this thesis identifies six types of manifest intertextuality and three kinds of constitutive intertextuality.In consideration of the particularity of the data and with respect to the feasibility of analysis,this thesis sets a comprehensive analysis framework combining Chen’s classification of manifest intertextuality based on the traces of intertextuality.The research data is made up of 16 pieces of SUA delivered by President Clinton(1993-2000)and Obama(2009-2016)respectively,and there is no comparison conducted on them.The thesis is being investigated from seven major aspects of manifest intertextuality,namely,constitution and legal documents,celebrity’s remarks,religion and Bible,proverbs,native discourse,international discourse,common people’s utterances;and three aspects of constitutive intertextuality,namely,theme,rhetoric and genre.The thesis is mainly a qualitative one with a simple data statistics.The qualitative analysis examines the identity constructing process in the SUA,and the simple statistics mainly investigate the frequency of intertextuality types.Deep investigation shows that the intertextuality is a prevalent discursive strategy in the SUA.Manifest intertextuality holds a percentage of 46.2%,and the percentage of constitutive intertextuality is 53.8%.Intertextuality plays a significant role in the construction of identity,and identity construction gains the nature of ideology.President Clinton and Obama aim to construct positive individual,group and national identities in the SUA.