CRITICAL DISCOURSE Analysis of Public Speech: A Case Study of Obama s Speech

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. Halliday developed an internationally influential grammar model—the Systemic Functional Grammar. It is the main foundation of CDA is as well as other theories in pragmatics. The aim of this study is to explore the relationships among ideology, language and power and to find out how to use the power of speeches to persuade the audience to accept and support his policies. The researcher selected the full transcript from for-mer president Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on Wednesday morning, Nov. 7, 2012. Then the researcher applied Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, in terms of one of the meta-functions: interpersonal function, to find out the formal features of Obama’s speeches. According to the Halliday’s theory, the researcher summa-rizes the features of Obama’s speeches as follow. First, through the analysis of modality, Obama made his audi-ence more easily to understand and accept his political speeches by means of modal verbs, structure and word choice. Next, he used more simple words and short sentences instead of difficult ones. Thus, it shortened the distance between him and the audience easily. Also, by using first person pronouns, especially ‘we’, he success-fully shortened the distance between him and the public. So it can help him persuade the audience to accept and support his policies. CDA explores the relationships among ideology, language and power. The results of this study provide a new idea and method to analyze public addresses. Also we looked at different strategies used by speakers on the panel to persuade the listeners about their opinions and judgments. So it is worth for English learners to pay more attention.