| In business settings,CEOs would always use speeches to form fruitful business relationships by relying on their discourse powers to defend their business ideologies and proposals,it is the same with political leaders.On January 21,2020,Donald Trump,the 45 th President of the United States attended the World Economic Forum in Davos,Switzerland,and delivered a speech,in which he mainly talked about the current economic situation in the US,its foreign business investment and trade deals with other countries.Throughout this speech,Trump employed many strategies to impose his power and ideology on the audience in order to manipulate and convince them of his and therefore,America' worth.In this sense,the language in his speech was used as an operating mechanism to help him achieve his ideological purpose.Therefore,the author selects this speech as the research subject and analyzes it through the prism of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA).The analysis of thesis comes from the aspects of transitivity,transformation and modality,to explore the business purpose of Trump's speech based on the social background and further reveal the power relations and ideologies hidden behind the language.Throughout the analysis of this speech,the author finds out that Trump expresses the unequal power relations between him and the audience,and conveys the ideologies of “America is number one” and “I am a great leader” throughout the speech.Firstly,Trump frequently employs the material process and the pronoun we to describe America's thriving economic situation since he took office.In doing so,he strengthens the ideology that America is the strongest country in the world that still holds a leading economic position.Secondly,Trump uses transformation to make the audience focus on the information he tends to underline,namely his achievements and contribution,in order to present himself as a successful leader in the eyes of the audience.His frequent use of medium value modal verbs,especially the verb “will”,which helps to convey his hope,vision and plan to the audience,as well as the employment of first-person pronouns my and I which connects Trump's administration to the recent economic development in America,are both used to strengthen the image of him as a great political and business leader.Thirdly,the author discovers Trump's tendency to place himself in a prominent position throughout the speech,especially in his choices in the modality system,such as the employment of high value modal verbs,like “must” and the pronoun you which puts Trump in the position of control in order to impose power on the audience.Moreover,the author also notices that Trump's preference for the material process indicates his intention to portray himself as an ‘action-taker',and the high frequency of I and my hints at his authoritarian and selfcentered personalityThe consistency of these conclusions shows Trump as a President who uses language that simultaneously elevates the image of his power to the audience,while attempting to manipulate them to buy into his ideology for mutual benefit.This thesis shows that using Critical Discourse Analysis on business speech can be an effective task.The combination of Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework,and three aspects of transitivity,transformation and modality as the research method,can be successfully applied to the examples of business speech.Critical Discourse Analysis is therefore of some significance for the study of business speech in a broader sense. |
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