A Comparative Study Of American Presidential Campaign Speeches Of Hillary And Trump:CDA Approach

Critical discourse analysis(CDA),a new branch of discourse analysis,was put forward in the early of 1980's,and now is a popular discourse analysis method.It reveals the relationship among language,power and ideologies through the analysis of the linguistic form of discourse.Therefore,CDA is often used to analyze the political discourse,news,commercial discourse and other discourses.Presidential campaign speech is one of the typical political discourses,which plays crucial role in the process of president election.Presidential campaign speech can reflect not only political stand but also political intentions of candidate and his/her party.This thesis aims to do a comparative analysis of the Donald John Trump and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign speech for 45 th U.S presidential election in2016.Because there are great deal of background and personal differences between Trump and Hillary,the usage of language and expression in Trump and Hillary' s speech are different.It is valuable and meaningful to analyze their language used in campaign speeches.Based on the Fairclough's three dimensional framework and taken Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as analysis tool,this thesis chooses one campaign speech of each candidate as analysis materials aiming to analyze campaign speech from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.This thesis combines the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis together in this research.The quantitative analysis is used when analyze the language of campaign speech,while in the analysis of the relationship between language and interaction with social context,the qualitative analysis is adapted.The analysis of campaign speech can be divided into three stages according to three dimensional framework,which are description,interpretation,and explanation.In the stage of description,the candidates' campaign speeches will be analyzed from the perspective of process types,participant,passivization,mood,tense,the choice of theme and cohesive devices based on the Halliday's Systemic Function Grammar.In the stage of interpretation,the content and the relationship of the participants in the campaign speech will be analyzed.In the stage of explanation,the ideology embodied in the campaign speeches and the relationship among language,power and ideologies have been explored with social and historical background.After analyzing the speeches,it can be found that the language feature such as transitivity,mood,passivization,tense,modal and the choice of theme are controlled by the language function and ideologies of speaker.The speaker's political goals,personal background,and the social context have influenced the production of the speeches.As the representative of ruling class,Trump and Hillary aim to get supports of audience by means of speech.The speakers use the language of speech to convey their thought to the audience so as to achieve their political objectives.Both of them want not only to construct harmony relationship between them and audience,but also to show their authority.The relationship among language,power and ideologies is dialectical.