Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama's 2012 Speeches: Views from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetoric

ISSN 1799-2591
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 6, pp. 1178-1187, June 2014
© 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.4.6.1178-1187

Critical Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama 's
2012 Speeches: Views from Systemic Functional
Linguistics and Rhetoric

Bahram Kazemian
Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

Somayyeh Hashemi
Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract—In the light of Halliday 's Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis, the major objectives of this study are to investigate and analyze Barack Obama 's 2012 five speeches, which amount to 19383 words, from the point of frequency and functions of Nominalization, Rhetorical strategies, Passivization and Modality, in which we can grasp the effective and dominant principles and tropes utilized in political discourse. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks based on a Hallidayan perspective are used to depict the orator’s deft and clever use of these strategies in the speeches which are bound up with his overall political purposes. The results represent that nominalization, parallelism, unification strategies and modality have dominated in his speeches. There are some antithesis, expletive devices as well as passive voices in these texts. Accordingly, in terms of nominalization, some implications are drawn for political writing and reading, for translators and instructors entailed in reading and writing pedagogy.

Index Terms— critical discourse analysis, ideational grammatical metaphor, rhetorical devices, Passivization, modality

I. INTRODUCTION

Language has a fundamental role in the conveyance of political orators’ staged-managed and pre-planned goals to the audience in order to provoke, prevail, and persuade the audience toward the intended goals and meanings (Woods,
2006). Language is not

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