VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES LÊ NỮ THU HẰNG A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON BARACK OBAMA’S RACE SPEECH (PHÂN TÍCH DIỄN NGÔN PHÊ PHÁN BÀI DIỄN VĂN VỀ CHỦNG TỘC CỦA BARACK OBAMA) MA COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 HÀ NỘI - 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HA NOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES LÊ NỮ THU HẰNG A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON BARACK OBAMA’S RACE SPEECH (PHÂN TÍCH DIỄN NGÔN PHÊ PHÁN BÀI DIỄN VĂN VỀ CHỦNG TỘC CỦA BARACK OBAMA) MA COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60. Professor, TRẦN HỮU MẠNH, PhD HÀ NỘI - 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY. iii LISTS OF FIGURES AND TABLES. vi PART A: INTRODUCTION.
1 2 Scope of the study. 2 3 Aims of the study. 5 6 Significance of the study. 6 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 What is CDA?.
Concepts of CDA and clarifications. Critical, Ideology, Power and Dominance, Racism. Discourse and racism .3 CDA in the world and in Vietnam .1 CDA in the world .2 CDA in Vietnam .4 Fairclough’s analytical framework.5 Systemic Functional Grammar and its role in CDA. 18 CHAPTER 2: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BARACK OBAMA’S RACE SPEECH .1 Context of the speech .1 Sociocutural and historical context .2 Barack Obama’s campaign and Reverend Wright’s controversy.
23 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.1 Experiential value of words.2 Relational value of words.3 Expressive value of words.1 Experiential value of grammar .2 Relational value of grammar .3 Expressive value of grammar .3 Macro-structure and argumentative strategy analysis .4 Rhetoric techniques analysis.1 Obama’s race speech in relation with his previous speeches and the collective language .2 Presuppositions and speech acts .1 The determination of social structures on Obama’s discourse .2 The effects of the discourse on social structures. 75 1 Summary of the discourse analysis. 78 3 Implications and suggestions for further study. 79 APPENDIXES Appendix 1: Barack Obama’s speech on race “A more perfect union” ………………………………………………I Appendix 2: Transitivity analysis ………………………………………………………………………………………………………XI Appendix 3: Barack Obama’s announcement for presidency………………………………….XXXIII LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv LISTS OF FIGURES AND TABLES LISTS OF FIGURES Figure 1: Dimensions of discourse and discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995a: 98).
18 Figure 4: Examples of Material clauses. 19 Figure 5: Examples of Mental clauses. 19 Figure 6: Examples of Relational clauses. 20 Figure 7: Examples of Verbal clauses.
20 Figure 8: Example of Behavioral process. 21 Figure 9: Example of Existential clause. 21 Figure 10: Summary of transitivity analysis. 43 LISTS OF TABLES Table 1: The Preamble.
53 Table 2: The race problem in the campaign. 54 Table 3: The current situation. 55 Table 4: The solutions. 56 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com v ABBREVIATIONS CDA: Critical discourse analysis MLK: Martin Luther King JFK: John Fitzgerald Kennedy RFK: Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale Barack Hussein Obama, the Illinois Senator, was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, 3 November, 2008, ―sweeping away the last racial barrier in politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive‖ (The New York Times, 4, November, 2004).
The Guardian commented: ―What is not open to doubt is that Mr Obama's win is a milestone in America's racial and cultural evolution. Obama's campaign was marked by his eloquent speeches, passionate supporters and worldwide fanfare for the Democratic candidate. In speech after speech, Barack Obama ―fired up‖ millions of enthusiastic supporters with his compelling rhetoric and charismatic presence. However, during his campaign, Obama had to face a fraught moment: while his campaign was conducted to transcend the issue of race and try to build a coalition of racial and ethnic groups favoring change, his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright declared that ―God damn America‖ for its mistreatment of blacks and that the country had provoked the September, 11, 2001 attacks.
The incendiary excerpts of Wright’s sermons dominated airwaves and generated great anger among white Americans, threatening to undermine Obama’s promise to bind up racial and political divisions. Being between the devil and the deep blue sea, Obama decided to give a speech. His campaign said that he wrote the speech himself overnight two days before he delivered it. His race speech ―A more perfect union‖ on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 in Philadelphia is considered historic by the American mass media and drew praise of American people and the political spectrum.
The speech electrified the whole America and stimulated millions of comments on televisions, radio talk shows, newspapers, websites, blogs, and discussions in offices, academic institutions and churches all over America. Commentators employed a lot of words to describe the speech: ―eloquent, brilliant, exemplary, sweeping, stirring, moving, passionate, emotional, courageous, gutsy, sophisticated, exceptional, breathtakingly LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 unconventional, etc‖. The speech tactfully ―rescued‖ Obama from the scandal, stably consolidated his position as a heavy candidate for presidency, and more importantly, opened up a national conversation about race – a very sensitive topic that people only ―tiptoe‖ around. It did help him lift up the racial barrier on the way to obtain the highest powerful position as the chief commander of the United States of America.
Therefore, the speech proves to be worthy of close study to find out the power of the language by Barack Obama - a black politician - in the fight against racism and inequality. The study is an attempt to clarify why the speech was such a success, how Obama handled his language to obtain power and contribute significantly to change social reality. The study is an effort to give an explanation to the unbelievable success of the Illinois Senator in the USA society from linguistic point of view, under the light of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2 Scope of the study The analysis of Barack Obama’s race speech is restricted in verbal aspects of the speech and some characteristics of the United States context at the time the speech was given.
Paralinguistic factors are also important in the effect of a discourse, but they exceed the limits of an M. Hence, these factors are excluded. The speech is quite long; it contains 4,909 words and lasts 37 minutes. Therefore, I just investigate the most salient linguistic aspects of the speech such as vocabulary, some grammatical properties (transitivity, pronouns, modality), textual features (macro-structure, rhetoric techniques) and some pragmatic traits.
Themes and mood are not examined. 3 Aims of the study The proposed study serves the following aims: - First, to examine the political discourse Barack Obama’s race speech from CDA perspectives with a view to uncovering how he exercises ideology and obtains his power, how he persuades people through his language use, what has made the speech great and what the relations between Obama’s individual language and the USA collective language are. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 - Second, to promote critical thinking of language users and learners in approaching political discourse by raising their awareness the role of language - a sharp weapon in power and ideology struggles to create social changes. In order to achieve these aims, the research questions are: 1.
How are Obama’s power and ideology manifested in terms of linguistic features such as lexicon, grammar, macro-structure, pragmatic properties and rhetoric techniques? How can these linguistic features contribute to the eloquence of the speech? 2. What are the relations between the production and interpretation of the discourse in terms of situational context and intertextual context? What are the relationships of Obama’s invidual language and the collectival language? 3. How is the speech constituted by social structures? And what are the effects of the speech on social structures? 4 Methodology Approach and methods This study is attached to Fairclough's approach with the reason that his analytical framework founded on SFL has been one of the most comprehensive frameworks of CDA. It covers in details three levels of discourse analysis: Description, Interpretation and Explanation.
This framework will be described more clearly in Part B, Chapter 1, section 1.4 Fairclough’s analytical framework. When carrying out Fairclough’s three stages, I resort to both quantitative and qualitative methods, with the dominance of the later. In Description stage, these two methods will be carried out to examine some linguistic features and their use in the speech. Quantitative method will be used to analyze linguistic features such as the vocabulary, the pronouns, processes etc.
in terms of quantity. Qualitative method will be employed to assess the effects of such linguistic features to express power, ideology and create the persuasiveness of the speech. In Interpretation stage, qualitative method will be applied to do socio-cultural, historical factors analysis and pragmatic analysis in order to clarify the social, historical and cultural relations between Obama and the contemporary U.S society, how these relations LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 influence the creation and reception of the discourse. In Explanation stage, qualitative method will also be made use of to find out how the discourse is determined by society and what influences the speech might have on Obama invidually and the US society in general.
Data collection Firstly, the race speech is collected from the website www. Next, some of Obama’s previous speeches are collected. They are The Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention 2004 and Announcement for President, February 2007. The former marked the first appearance of Obama as a rising star on the political stage.
The latter is related to the content of the analyzed discourse. Particularly, it is said that Obama’s language echoes many orators in the past, so some famous speeches are selected: I have a dream (Martin Luther King), the Cooper Union Speech and the Gettysburg Address (Abraham Lincoln), the Address to a Greater Houston (John F. Lastly, some related online articles are also compiled from Internet to get more insight in the production and interpretation of the text, as well as evaluate the effects of the speech on social processes. They are articles from the most popular websites such as The Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc.
Data analysis First of all, the major features of context are provided so that the readers can understand more about the appearance of the speech. Then, the speech will be analyzed in three stages. In Description stage, the speech will be interpreted in terms of discoursal features, which include lexical, grammatical characteristics, macro-structure and rhetoric techniques. In Interpretation stage, the speech will be investigated in terms of situational context and intertextual context.
Situational context will be looked at from social, cultural, and historical features. With regard to intertextual context, the race speech will be put in the links with some of Obama’s previous related speeches and other speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy. Besides, pragmatic analysis will reveal how effectively Obama employs presuppositions and speech acts to convey his ideology and messages to the audience. In Explanation stage, the impacts of the discourse on American society in terms of the fight against racism and the securing Obama’s power will be discussed.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 5 Design The study comprises three parts. They are: PART A: INTRODUCTION. This part contains the rationale, scope, aims, methodology and the significance of the study. This main part includes two chapters.
Chapter 1 Literature review includes a description of CDA, some basic concepts of CDA, a summary of CDA works in the world and in Vietnam and a procedure of doing CDA. Chapter 2 A critical discourse analysis of Barack Obama's race speech comprises four main sections: Section 2.