1、 本科毕业论文 ( 20 届) 英语 美国总统就职演讲的批评性话语分析 Critical Discourse Analysis of U.S. Presidents Kennedys ideology; systemic-functional linguistics; inaugural addresses Contents 摘要 . I Abstract . II 1. Introduction . 1 1.1 Background of the study . 1 1.2 Main purpose of this paper . 2 2. About CDA and Ideology. 3
2、 2.1 A brief review of Critical Discourse Analysis . 3 2.2 The principles of CDA . 4 2.3 What is ideology? . 5 3. Theoretical Foundation . 7 3.1 The ideational function . 7 3.2 The interpersonal function . 9 3.3 The textual function . 9 4. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Kennedys & Obamas Inaugural
3、 Speeches . 10 4.1 Data collection and procedure . 10 4.2 Transitivity . 10 4.3 Mood system . 12 4.4 Nominalization . 13 5. Conclusion . 15 5.1 Summary of the thesis . 15 5.2 Limitations of the study . 16 Bibliography . 17 Acknowledgements .错误 !未定义书签。 1 1. Introduction 1.1 Background of the study An
4、 inaugural address is the presidential speech given at inauguration ceremony which aims to maintain social stability and governments smooth functioning, to get the audience to accept the dominant ideological representations and to identify with him her This kind of speech is American oriented, strat
5、egy oriented and spirit oriented Different from many other forms of political discourses, inaugural address is produced to reflect the fundamental political values and embody ideologies of the presidents party and country Therefore, it is inevitably laden with a strong opinion of national power and
6、the underlying ideologies Inaugural addresses are delivered to voice the countrys diplomatic strategies , governmental stands and political attitudes In such speech, the president is required to impress the public through carefully weighing his words and polishing his address, to propagate the domin
7、ant society-constructed ideological assumptions and representations, and to motivate or encourage the public Through such a powerful weapon, the president can better touch the right chord of the audience and fully achieve his political intentions Also, the audience can be unconsciously moved or pers
8、uaded, and then accept what he she said Presidential inaugural addresses can be studied from many perspectives Traditional discourse studies are conducted from the perspective of topic, lexical style and rhetorical features, which seems to be rather superficial Since political discourse can only be
9、adequately described and analyzed when we take the contextual environment into consideration and spell out the social interface that relates it to the socially shared political representations that control political actions,processes and systems, this thesis will conduct a systematic and comprehensi
10、ve inaugural address study with the consideration of textual and social analysis in order to expose the concealed ideology and power in the speech and deepen our understanding of the speech The word critical originates from Greek word “critic” It means 2 “understanding the dialectical relationship b
11、etween language and ideology hidden in the discourse” Since the publication of Language and Control (R Fowler, G Kress,Trew, 1979) , critical discourse analysis has been a key term for the linguists According to Van Dijk, Critical Discourse Analysis is a type of discourse analytical research that pr
12、imarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resis
13、t social inequality. 1.2 Main purpose of this paper Firstly, the aim of the study is to determine if there is a practical method that can be used to reveal the ideology concealed in a political speech and to point out politicians manipulation of linguistic tools to accomplish their purposes When tal
14、king about political speeches, people usually pay more attention to the “excellent speech skills”,but not to the aims and methods behind them Then we all know that when people read or hear something, they just passively accepted the producers ideas or beliefs without rethinking about them Questions
15、such as “Is it really true? and “Why did he she express that kind of view?” were hardly noticed by them Thus the thesis also intends to raise and foster peoples critical awareness, help them cultivate their sensitivity to the controlling power of the discourse over them and develop their critical re
16、ading ability Thirdly, the critical discourse analysis of the speech discourses is fundamentally based on the Systemic-functional Grammar, at the heart of which is the view that language is a social process The analysis focuses on the internal features and external effects of the discourse This crit
17、ical viewpoint of the discourse is comprehensive and objective It brings efficient methods to study the relationship among language,ideology and power This new point of view of analyzing the politic speeches will enable us to put our theoretical knowledge into practice. Finally, inaugural addresses
18、are a significant part of the inauguration ceremony,3 establishing the keynote of the ceremony and drawing back the prologue of the governorship of the new administration They are the most realistic, comprehensive and specific recordings of history, shaping an epitome of the development of United Sa
19、tes They provide us with a stand and perspective to know about the past, the present and the future of the United Sates Obviously, this new perspective is the important value for the understanding of the United States 2. About CDA and Ideology 2.1 A brief review of Critical Discourse Analysis Accord
20、ing to Fairclough(1992: 12-13), discourse analysis approaches can be divided into two types: non-critical and critical approaches Non-critical approaches mainly concentrate on pure description and analysis of grammatical rules, textual rules,rhetorical rules as well as coherence and cohesion of disc
21、ourse Without considering social and historical context, these approaches tend to be superficial and have their limitations to some extent While the critical approach to discourse analysis mainly refers to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA for short) CDA is the achievements of the British and Austral
22、ian pioneers of critical linguistics, especially Fowler, Kress, Van Dijk and Fairclough This term was first put forward in 1979 in the book entitled Language and Control by Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress, and Robert Hodge, and one of the methods of discourse analysis Critical Discourse Analysis takes t
23、he study of language as a starting point for their research, and mainly focused on the critical study of public or non-literary discourses It is a socially directed application of linguistic analysis , and mainly adopts Systemic-functional Grammar developed by M A K Halliday as theoretical basis to
24、analyze political discourse in order to explore the ideology and power imbedded in the representations Ruth Wodak defines CDA as “an interdisciplinary approach to language study with a critical point of view for the purpose of studying language behavior in natural speech situations of social relevan
25、ce” Summarizing the work in CDA, Kress explains that unlike discourse analysis or 4 text linguistics with their descriptive goals, CDA has “the larger political aim of putting the forms of texts, the processes of production of texts, and the process of reading, together with the structures of power
26、that have given rise to them, into crisis”(Kress, 1990: 85) According to him, CDA has now become an area of study with a variety of approaches in each of a number of disciplines, which aims to “provide a better understanding of socio-cultural aspects of texts and accounts of the production of intern
27、al structure, and overall organization of texts”, as well as “to provide a critical dimension in its theoretical and descriptive accounts of text”(Kress,1990) Generally speaking, the main aim of CDA is to explore the dialectical connections between discourse practices, social practices, and social s
28、tructures,connections that might be opaque to the lay person As Wodak proposes that critical analysis should not remain descriptive and neutral(Wodak, 1989), the interests guiding such an analysis are aimed at uncovering injustice and inequality, taking sides with the powerless and suppressed To und
29、erstand CDA, two terms need to be explained One is the word “critical” According to Xin Bin(2000: 14), “critical” in CDA firstly means that this kind of discourse analysis is to find the relationships between ideas, which are implied in the words, and their social conditions in which the ideas exist
30、 Secondly, it means that CDA is to expose certain connections between language, power and ideology, which people are unconscious of. 2.2 The principles of CDA The principles of CDA outlined by the representatives (Fairclough, 1995; Kress,1991; Hodge&Kress, 1993; Van Dijk, 1998a; Wodak, 1996) can be summarized as follows: 1 Language is a social practice through which the world is represented 2 Discourse language use as a form of social practice in itself not only represents and signifies other social practices but also constitutes other social practice such