- •Masaryk university brno
- •Content
- •1 Introduction
- •2 Theoretical part
- •2.1 Pragmatics
- •2.1.1 Syntax, semantics and pragmatics
- •2.1.2 Reference, inference, presupposition and entailment
- •2.2. Discourse
- •2.2.1 Discourse Analysis
- •2.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis
- •2.2.3 The Role of Cohesion
- •2.2.3.1 Discourse, Context and Co-text
- •2.3 The Nature of Discourse and Political Speeches
- •2.3.1 Politics and its Theoretical Bases
- •2.3.2 Features of Political Participation
- •2.3.3 The Features of Spoken Political Speeches and their Gradual Changes
- •2.3.3.1 Changes of the Features of Political Speeches through the Time
- •2.3.3.2 The Influence of Media on Changes in Political Speeches
- •2.3.4 Problems of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.4.1 Some Features of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.4.2 Necessary Principles of Analysis of Political Discourse
- •2.3.5 The Presence of Power, Ideology and Persuasion in Political Speeches
- •2.3.5.1 Ideological Argumentation and Persuasion
- •2.3.5.2 Tolerance and Opposition to Persuasive Argumentation
- •2.4 The Position of the us in Contemporary World
- •2.5 Summary
- •3 Practical part
- •3.1 Corpus under Investigation
- •3.2 Scrutiny of all speeches
- •3.2.1 Obama's domestic speeches
- •3.2.1.1 Victory Speech
- •3.2.1.2 Inaugural Speech
- •3.2.1.3 Address to the Congress on February 24, 2009
- •3.2.1.4 State of the Union Address 2010
- •3.2.1.5 State of the Union 2011
- •3.2.2 Obama's Foreign Speeches
- •3.2.2.1 Remarks by President Obama at Strasbourg Town Hall;
- •3.2.2.2 Remarks by President Obama at a New Start Treaty Signing Ceremony and Press Conference
- •3.2.2.3 Remarks at the Meeting with Future Chinese Leaders
- •3.2.2.4 Remarks by President Obama at g20 Press Conference in Toronto,
- •3.2.2.5 Remarks by the President to Parliament in London
- •3.3 Comparison of the speeches
- •3.3.1 Comparison of Obama’s domestic speeches
- •3.3.2 Comparison of Obama`s Foreign Speeches
- •4 Comparison and conclusion
- •5 Bibliography
- •5.1 Primary Sources
- •5.2 Secondary Sources
2.2. Discourse
Our attention has been so far devoted just to the questions of pragmatics. In the following chapter and sub-chapters, the focus is shifted to the question of discourse and its methods of analysis.
The term discourse is sometimes attributed to any kind of communicated information. This description is not so far from the truth; however, attention should be paid to all of premises which influence real discourse. All of the meanings which accompany the act of communication are joined in order to form clauses, sentences and utterances. Nevertheless, these structures have sense as a well-formed discourse only in particular situational context (Dontcheva-Navrátilová; ch. 5). It means, for its analysis, not only syntactic and semantic features are important but also the pragmatic features of particular situation, as it has been stressed in the previous chapter.
Nevertheless, the discourse includes all of its possible forms i.e. spoken or written and also the monologue or the dialogue. The first pair is distinguished under the heading of the medium; the second pair, on the other side, is the result of the nature of the participation during a concrete communicative event and may be bring together under the heading of various aspects of modality. All of these four types have their typical features; nevertheless, it sometimes happens that features that are usually associated with informal dialogic speech are part of a written text, or, on the contrary, when some formal features usually ascribed to writing are incorporated into a public speech (Crystal 69).
Crystal elsewhere tells that "any piece of discourse contains a large number of features which are difficult to relate to specific variables to in the original extra-linguistic context even though the may be felt to have some kind of stylistic value" (63). The analysis thus should be done very carefully in order to catch all contextual features as much as it is possible.
2.2.1 Discourse Analysis
It is not surprising to say that there are various kinds of discourse which may be characterized by various features. However, more intriguing is the question how to recognize these features and how to analyze them. In the following sub-chapter, there are examples of some of the methods of critical discourse analysis.
2.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis
The word "Critical" prompts that an analyst should be truly careful when he is trying to decode the particular discourse. Various analyses of different kinds of discourse (such as of the misrepresentation of political demonstrations, as "violent riots", or of bias in favor of the authorities) has proved that such detailed critical analyses bring the analyst to the wider context of the authorities and their power as a core for political action (Handbook of Discourse Analysis 3: 7).
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a helpful method in multiple areas, such as education, literacy, gender, racism, ideology, economic, advertisements, institutional and media language, and, most importantly for this thesis, political discourse. In all these areas CDA focuses on issues like power asymmetries, manipulation, structural inequalities and exploitation (Blommaert 451-452).
Each critical discourse analysis usually consists of 3 steps. The first one is the descriptive stage which examines the basic formal properties of the discourse. It is also the pre-step for the next two steps. The second stage, interpretation, endeavors to link the discourse with interaction, i.e. to see the discourse as a result of process of production and also as a resource in the act of interpretation. And the third stage, explanation, which is the most important but which would not probably possible without previous two steps, attempts to find the relationships between interaction and social context i.e. which social determinants are necessary in the processes of interaction, production and their social effects (Fairclough 26).