Nationalism Review on the Ideologies of America

1. Study on President Barack Hussein Obama‟s Address

The critical discourse study which has been done on the similar topic is entitled, A Criti cal Discourse Analysis of Barack Obama’s Addresses by Junling Wang. She is from the School of Foreign Languages, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China. She shows that the Critical Discourse Analysis is applicable to analyze political discourse including the public address, in which the speaker wins favorite response from the audience. She bases her writing on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics. She analyzes Barack Obama‘s presidential addresses mainly from the point oftransitivity and modality. In the analysis, she proves that language is a way to serve the ideology and power. She reveals also the political purpose of these addresses. In the conclusion part, she finds that Obama‘s address are structured in a such way to shorten the distance between him and the audience, to have the audience understand and accept his political and to persuade the public to accept and support his policies. The text of the address as data source leads to theses significances from the structure of the language itself. The address may employ colloquial words and short sentences instead of the complicated structures. From transitivity analysis, it applies on process of doing. Modality is analyzed to refer to a speaker‘s attitudes towards or opinion about the truth of a proposition expressed by a sentence. Wang‘s study develops the same approach to what the writer is going to use in this study. The transitivity analysis is then proven to be a useful device in Critical Discourse Analysis to collect and categorize the language items that are put in the text to make meaning. However in this study, the writer is going to have a deeper analysis on the relation among the language, discourse, power, and political importance behind two transcribed address. It does not only work on the first inaugural address but also the second inaugural address by President Barack Hussein Obama to see any different issues built in particular structure of language and later on is to find the development of Obama‘s ideology. What makes this Wang‘s study different from this thesis is that here the writer is trying to see the development of ideology of the President throughout the first term of office.

2. Study on Systemic Functional Linguistics

A writing on the similar topic is reviewed because it prove that Systemic Functional Grammar developed by M. A. K. Halliday since 1960s is suitable language analysis tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. It is entitled Role Prescriptions, Social Practices, and Social Structures: A Sociological Basis for the Contextualization of Analysis in SFL and CDA written by José Luiz Meurer. This paper is taken from papers collection in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis compiled by Lynne Young and Claire Harrison. In the paper, Meurer explores some theories and finds the relevance among them in language study and society. It puts the concern in both SFL and CDA as a method to establish clear relationship between language and context. ―I suggest that SFL and CDA may incorporate the term chains of practices and explore the way every social practice interrelates with other social practices within larger social structures. This inter dependence may be captured by the notion of inter -contextuality; as different practices are carried out, inter dependent social structures and, thus, contexts, may be implicated.‖ Meurer, 2004: 89