Critical Discourse Analysis Of Conversations In House Of Cards

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)aims to explore the relationship among language,power and ideology by analyzing the linguistic features as well as the social and historical backgrounds of language production.Critical discourse analysis has been widely applied in public discourses,such as political speeches and news reports,where its values have been confirmed.In comparison,the application of CDA in spoken discourses,such as movies and TV drama,has always been very rare.This thesis intends to conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis of individual discourses in political struggle TV drama by choosing the conversations in House of Cards as the linguistic data.This paper adopts the three-dimensional model by Fairclough as the analytical framework and analyzes the corpus through three stages:At the description stage,the author takes systemic functional grammar by Halliday as the tool,conducting an analysis of the linguistic features such as transitivity,mood and modality in terms of ideational function and interpersonal function with the purpose of exploring the ideology and power relations hidden behind utterances as well as the purposes of the speakers.At the interpretation stage,the author elaborates on the production process by analyzing the effects of language in certain contexts in combination with the relationship among the speakers.At the explanation stage,the author explains the discourse from the social perspective.In this stage,the author tries to reveal how social factors affect the usage of language from ideology and power relations.The following findings can be observed from the research:1)The choosing of transitivity,mood and modality in individual discourse is largely determined by ideology,power relationship and the communicative goals of the addresser and addressee;2)Language is used to serve the respective communication objectives between the addresser and addressee and it can reflect the significant difference between them in terms of ideology,power relationship,social status,etc.;3)Language,as an effective political instrument,plays a pivotal role in helping western politicians to display their authorities and ideology for developing social connections and consolidating social statuses.From the theoretical perspective,this study supplements and enriches previous research on critical discourse analysis.From the practical perspective,people can gain some enlightenment from this thesis,so as to cultivate their critical awareness and improve the sensitivity to the implicit meaning of politician discourse.