Obama's Speech on the Killing of Osama Bin Laden

Montevideo, Uruguay

Congreso; VIII-Congreso-ALSFAL; 2012

ALSFAL

CDA looks at how members of social groups especially those with more power and access to the media discursively articulate their ideologies to serve their group´s interests. SFL´s view of language as a meaning making resource provides analytic tools that facilitate the unveiling of hidden ideological meanings. This paper analyses Barack Obama´s speech after Osama Bin Laden was killed, and its aim is to describe the argumentative purpose behind lexico-grammatical choices and their ideological significance in Obama´s speech. A combination of key notions of CDA (van Dijk, 2001) and SFL (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) has been used. Some context-related concepts from SFL are used to describe social power and control of public discourse; while elements in Theme, Mood and Transitivity are quantified in a clause by clause analysis of Barack Obama´s speech to determine how mind control (van Dijk, 2001) is linguistically exerted. The analysis indicates that the persuasive nature of the political speech is achieved linguistically though the realization of Textual meanings in thematisation of adjuncts of time, of Interpersonal meanings in the modalization used and a dichotomy of subjects, and of Experiential meanings in the frequent use of material processes logically organized in a chronological narrative