| Critical discourse analysis(CDA)is considered to be a prevalent branch of linguistics,having been widely used to analyze all types of discourses such as legal documents,political speeches and news reports since its birth in the 1980s.As political speech serves as an increasing way to deliver ideology,more and more researchers are paying heed to the political speeches to explore the hidden relationships among language,power and ideology.Critical discourse analysis is usually concentrated on political addresses for the reason of the public tending to accept ideas of political addresses in a passive way.Therefore,CDA works as a key method to reveal the hidden ideology and power of the political speech.As for this thesis,stress has been put on linguistic features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses,in which CDA framework has been employed.The study selects Donald Trump's weekly addresses during the first half of 2018 as research materials.Weekly addresses represent the most official statements of the President of the United States which usually deliver current ideologies and attitudes toward one or several issues of the United States.So Weekly Address enjoys a high prestige among Americans.The current research focuses on the analysis of the linguistic features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses under CDA framework.Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework?description,interpretation and explanation-is adopted with the help of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar.To begin with,this thesis makes the analysis of Trump's addresses from the perspective of explanation to clarify the linguistic features.Next,it makes the analysis of the linguistic features from the perspective of interpretation.Then,from the perspective of description,the linguistic features of Trump's addresses are analyzed along with Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar.Donald Trump's linguistic features of weekly addresses could be concluded in following aspects.In the aspect of linguistic features under explanation,his addresses are mainly about economy and politics which determine the linguistic expressions.From the aspect of linguistic feature under interpretation,these addresses concern about economic recovery and alien immigrant issues,which determines the target audience and discourse practice types.As for the aspect of description of text,Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar is adopted,laying stress on figuring out how weekly addresses achieve its ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.In terms of ideational function,transitivity and lexical choice are chosen as tools to make the analysis of linguistic features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses.According to transitivity analysis,material process clauses are most frequently used.Relational process clauses take up the second prominent place.Mental process clauses take up the third place.According to lexical choice analysis,it has been found that Donald Trump tends to use evaluative words,which could efficiently convey his ideology to the audience.He also tends to categorize words which could shorten distance with Americans,and it helps him win Americans' supports to fight against the democrat senators and alien immigrants.In his weekly addresses,he adopts generalization in the choice of verbal expressions,which is a strategy employed by Donald Trump to escape the responsibility of delivering uncertain statements.As for interpersonal function,modality auxiliaries are used to make the analysis.Donald Trump is prone to lower frequency of using modality auxiliaries in the weekly addresses.And among modality auxiliaries,low value auxiliaries take up a high percentage of auxiliaries in Donald Trump's weekly addresses which sound friendly in public speech.In terms of textual function,intertextuality of Donald Trump's weekly addresses are analyzed.It is concluded that Donald Trump hardly exploits intertextuality because of his original identity of businessman.The structure of this thesis is as follows:chapter one serves as an introduction to basic background,significance and structure of this thesis;chapter two is literature review about the related studies of CDA home and abroad;chapter three introduces theoretical framework of this research,including Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar;chapter four is concerned with methodology,research process and analytical tools;chapter five expounds the core of this thesis which makes a detailed analysis of linguistic features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses from the perspective of combining Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar.And this chapter analyzes the language features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses from three aspects:features under explanation,feature under interpretation,and features under description;chapter six is the conclusion which arrives at the major findings and points out limitations and suggestions of this thesis.The new ideas of the thesis are as follows:firstly,all materials involved in the analysis are currently delivered by Donald Trump;secondly,in the process of analysis,stress has been put on linguistic features of Donald Trump's weekly addresses. |
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