A Critical Discoures Analysis On New Years’ Speeches Of The American Presidents

As a newly developed approach in modern linguistics,critical discourse analysis explores relationships between language and ideology,which is popularly applied in studying the public discourses and official discourses.Under the principle of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model in critical analysis,this thesis integrally adopts both quantitative and qualitative method to probe 14 pieces of American President’s New Year Speeches from the scopes of linguistic features,production mechanism and social context.The first dimension the author employs the transitivity theory to explore the distribution of transitivity and clarifies the relationship between language and ideology hidden in the new year’s speech.In the second dimension,the production and interpretation of the discourse are elaborated through intertextuality.The third dimension discusses the culture and social context in causing the ideology.The result indicates that the presidents’ political ideology embedded in discourse is gaining acceptance and support from audiences.In order to achieve goal,the speaker establishes a responsible,capable and competent image of government under his leadership.Besides,a powerful and vigorous prospect of the nation and people is pictured as well.Therefore,the speaker earns trust and faith from audiences.Transitivity system and intertextuality play a crucial significance in carrying the speaker’s political purposes and ideology in new years’ speeches.The research also proves that the critical discourse analysis,transitivity,and intertextuality could form a feasible and comprehensive analytical model to conduct a research.The research will enlarge the empirical application of those three theories in a theoretical sense,but also the audiences’ dialectical awareness in political discourse will be fostered and improved.In addition,the thesis will contribute a humble effort to development of political linguistics in a practical sense.