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PART A: INTRODUCTION
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1. Rationale
There has been much written in recent years about Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA for
short). It appears to be quite difficult to define CDA in simple terms. However, CDA is my
choice for the MA thesis because first and foremost, CDA regards language as a social
practice – language is a part of society, language is a social process, and language is a
socially conditioned process. These implications have been discussed in details by Norman
Fairclough (1989).
Then, it can be inferred from above implications that doing discourse analysis involves in
not merely analyzing texts, processes of production and interpretation, but also analyzing
the relationship between texts, processes, and their social conditions – or in other terms,
the relationship between texts, interactions, and contexts. And CDA is critical in the sense
that it shows connections and causes which are hidden – such as the connection between
language, power and ideology, the problems of inequality and racism – through discourse
analysis. More clearly stated, CDA is critical when it explicitly addresses social problems
and seeks to solve social problems through the analysis and accompanying social and
political action. The intention of the analysts in this view of ‘critical’ is explicitly oriented
toward locating social problems and analyzing how discourse operates to construct and
historically constructed by such issues. They must work from the analysis of texts to the
social and political context in which the texts emerge. CDA thus can be said a very
practical form of discourse analysis. It seeks not only to describe language but also to offer
critical resources to those wishing to resist various forms of power.
For those mentioned reasons, a speech by Martin Luther King “Beyond Vietnam – A Time
to Break Silence” is to be analyzed from the CAD viewpoint together with the hope that
this study may vice versa help illustrate and clarify CDA concepts. Despite being delivered
in 1967, this speech was especially mentioned by many Americans when the U.S.
government decided to attack Iraq in 2003. It is the ideological and topical features of this
speech that “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” by Martin Luther King has been
chosen. During the course of analyzing the speech, the way power and ideology embedded
in texts and coded in language use will be gradually manifested. Although I am a supporter
of Martin Luther King, I will try to be objective towards political issues in the speech – a
crucial demand in CDA – as a base for critical reading of any text and developing scientific
and objective standpoint towards any discourse where power relations may exist.
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Another reason for choosing CDA comes from my own personal interest. In general, when
any theory or approach in linguistics appears, it will be studied and, through researches,
practically applied to teaching and leaning. CDA has shown its role in social sciences, but I
am really interested in the fact that whether CDA viewpoint is of some help in language
teaching and learning. I hope to find the answer during the application of CDA approach in
the analysis of the speech “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” by Martin Luther
King.
2. Scope of the study
The analysis of Martin Luther King’s speech is confined to verbal aspects of the speech
and the social context when the speech was delivered. Because of some reasons,
paralinguistic (intonation, speed, loudness, etc.) and extralinguistic (facial expression, eye
contact, etc.) factors are not taken into account though they are important in the discourse.
This is a pure linguistic study and for academic purpose only. I will not express my own
political view. And this study is not for or against any party or to change anyone’s political
viewpoint.
3. Objectives and aims of the study
The objectives of the study in analyzing Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam –
A Time to Break Silence” from CDA standpoint include:
-
Providing a theoretical background of CDA – its concepts, its analysis procedures
as well as its role in social scientific research and in general in linguistics in
particular.
-
Finding out hidden power/struggle and ideology from linguistic elements of the text.
In order to realize this aim, the study is supposed to answer the following research
questions:

How are power and ideology realized lexically and
grammatically?

How are power and ideology realized in terms of transitivity
and thematic structures?

How are power and ideology realized macro structurally?
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Besides, this study also aims at:
-
Providing an objective view as a linguist when approaching texts, especially those
addressing power and ideology.
-
Trying to develop the ability in critical thinking.
-
Finding the application of CAD approach in language teaching and learning.
4. Design of the study
The study consists of three parts. They are:
Part A: Introduction: This part presents the rationale, scope, aims, methodology, and
design of the study.
Part B: Development: This is the main part and it consists of three chapters.
Chapter 1: Theoretical background.
This chapter gives an overview of CDA – its history, role, concepts, and procedure.
Systemic-functional theory is also concerned in this chapter.
Chapter 2: A critical discourse analysis of Martin Luther King’s speech: ‘Beyond
Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence’.
The CDA procedure addressed by Fairclough and systemic-functional theory are applied to
analyze the speech to find out the connection between power/struggle, ideology and the
language.
Chapter 3: Implications
Some implications of applying CDA in developing critical thinking, in language teaching
and learning.
Part C: Conclusion
This part summarizes the main findings of the study, draws important conclusion and
offers suggestions for further research.
References
Appendices
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5. Methodology
To carry out this study, the following procedures and techniques involving both qualitative
and quantitative research method will be employed.
Approach
CDA as an approach will be applied in the speech analysis to uncover hidden
power/struggle and ideology. The three stages of CDA given by Norman Fairclough (2001)
will be used. The three stages are the text analysis, interpretation and explanation. To put it
more specifically, following are techniques involving in the analysis.
Techniques
In terms of data collection, number of books and articles about CDA will be collected and
thoroughly studied so that I can build the theoretical background of CDA for the anlysis.
There may be of course different viewpoints of CDA, so I will read and take those that are
most suitable for my analysis of the speech. Besides, as suggested by Norman Fairclough
in his paper (1991) in Discourse & Society : ‘Systemic-functional linguistics also has a
view of texts which is a potentially powerful basis not only for analysis of what is in texts,
but also for analysis of what is absent or omitted from texts”, Halliday’s functional
grammar is also my focus. Besides, documents for a panorama of the social context are
also needed.
In terms of text analysis, the linguistic features (lexicology and grammar) of the text will
be described to see how power/struggle and ideological position of the speaker are encoded
in the text. I will analyze vocabulary with attention to formal words, classification schemes,
synonyms and antonyms. Then, as suggested by Fairclough (2001), grammar features will
be analyzed including personal pronoun, voice, modes of the sentence, modality and
connective values of the text.
Apart from that, the text is also analyzed in terms of transitivity, thematization, and
macrostructure. I will look at the dominant processes in clauses of the speech how
ideology and power are hidden in transitivity. The text will be also broken into information
units (Halliday, 1994) so that I can identify them theme and rheme in sentence structure to
interpret their structural role in the introduction of new information. Regarding
macrostructure or overall idea of the speech, the text will be divided into major sections
and then four procedures namely attributive deletion, predictive deletion, simple
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generalization, and integration suggested by Van Dijk (1977, 144-146) will be applied. In
this part, my aim is to uncover power and ideology hidden behind words.
The next step is interpreting the relationship between the processes of text production and
interpretation. There are two domains here: interpretation of situation context and
interpretation of intertextual context. In the interpretation of situation, I follow questions
given by Fairclough (2001): what’s going on, who’s involve, what relationships are at
issue, and what’s the role of language. In interpretation of intertextual context,
presuppositions are in focus.
And then, explanation concerned with the relationship between those processes and social
context – how the discourse change or sustain certain social relationship in social structure
– is needed. The speech will be looked at as a social practice in relation with other social
practices.
Finally, implications will deduced from my understanding in CDA, in language teaching
and learning methodologies as well as my own experience.
6. Significance
Theoretically, this study provides a support to CDA theories. From an objective view as a
linguist when approaching texts, CDA analysts can find out ideology and power hidden
behind words. Practically, this study is submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements of
my degree of Master in Linguistics. Moreover, it may provide me another approach to
language teaching and learning: looking at language teaching and learning from CDA
viewpoint.
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PART B: DEVELOPMENT
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Chapter 1:
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1.1. An overview of CDA
Critical Discourse Analysis, CDA for short, is a fairly new branch of linguistics. Formerly,
Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis were used interchangeably, but in
recent times it seems that the latter is preferred and is used to denote the theory formerly
identified as Critical Discourse.
CDA as a network of scholars appeared in the early 1990s. It is marked by the birth of Van
Dijk’s journal Discourse and Society (1990) as well as through several books, like
Language and Power by Norman Fairclough (1989), Language, Power and Ideology by
Ruth Wodak or Van Dijk’s first book on racism, Prejudice in Discourse (1984). But since
the Amsterdam in January 1991, more researchers have started work with CDA, new
journals have been launched, multiple overview has been written, and nowadays CDA is
an established paradigm in linguistics.
Many of the basic assumptions of CDA that were salient in early stages and elaborated in
later development of the theory are stated in Kress’s work (1989).
CDA considers
language as a social phenomenon. Not only individuals, but also institutions and social
groupings have specific meanings and values, that are expressed in language in systematic
ways. In CDA, texts are seen as the relevant units of language in communications, readers
and hearers are not passive recipients in their relationship to texts, and there are similarities
between the language of science and the language of institutions, and so on. However, a
clearer and more general approach to CDA can be found in the work by Fairclough and
Wodak (1997). According to them, CDA regards “language as social practice” and takes
consideration of the context of language use to be crucial.
Language is a social practice means that language is a part of society, language is a social
process, and language is a socially conditioned process. In Fairclough’s point of view
(2001), firstly, language is a part of society in the sense that linguistic phenomena are
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social phenomena, and vice versa although this relationship is not symmetrical. Whenever
people speak or listen or read or write, they involve in a/some social relationship(s). And
the language they use is not only socially determined by the social relationships but also
affects them in helping to maintain (or change) these relationships. Social phenomena are
linguistic, on the other hand, in the sense that the language activity in social contexts is not
merely a reflection or expression of social processes and practices, it is a part of those
processes and practices. For example, disputes about the meaning of political expressions
are an aspect of politics.
Secondly, language is a social process. Language comes into life in form of texts (the term
Michael Halliday uses for both written and spoken texts). In CDA, text is not discourse.
Text is the product of text production and the resource for the process of interpretation.
During the processes of text production and text interpretation, people have to depend on
what they have in minds – including their knowledge of language, natural and social
worlds, values, beliefs, assumptions and so on. In other terms, text is the traces of the
productive process and cues in the interpretative process. (Fairclough, 2001)
Thirdly, language is a socially conditioned process as the processes of production and
interpretation are socially determined. Text producers and interpreters not only draw upon
what are there in their heads, they are also socially generated and socially transmitted.
People internalize what is socially produced and made available to them and use this to
engage in their social practice, including discourse. To make it clearer, Fairclough (2001)
calls what discourse participants have in their minds during the course of interpreting and
producing texts as Member’s Resources (MR) - resources for productive and interpretative
processes. MR have both cognitive and social features as they come from people’s mind
while they are socially originated.
Thus, when CDA sees language as discourse and as a social practice, apart from analyzing
texts, productive and interpretive processes, the relationship between texts, processes and
their conditions needs to be taken into account. The following figure can be seen as an
illustration of this relationship.
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Social conditions of production
Process of production
Text
Process of interpretation
Interaction
Social conditions of interpretation
Context
Figure 1: Discourse as text, interaction and context
(Fairclough, 2001:21)
However, CDA is made distinguished in terms of “critical”. According to Rogers, R.
(2004), the concept of critical is rooted in the Frankfurt school of critical theory (Adorno,
1973; Adorno & Horkeimer,1972; Habermas, 1976). Critical research and theory is a
rejection of naturalism (that social practices, labels, and programs represent reality),
rationality (the assumption that truth is a result of science and logic), neutrality (the
assumption that truth does not reflect any particular interests), and individualism. Critical
research rejects the overdeterministic view of social theory espoused by Marxists and
instead argues for dialectic between agency and structural determinism. As with all
research, the intentions of critical discourse analysts are not neutral.
Teun A.van Dijk in the paper Multidisciplinary CDA: a plea for diversity (collected by
Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. 2001) considers “CDA as a – critical – perspective on doing
scholarship: it is, so to speak, discourse analysis “with an attitude”. It focuses on social
problems, and especially on the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of
power abuse or domination. Wherever possible, it does so from a perspective that is
consistent with the best interests of dominated groups.
The term critical in CDA is often associated with studying power relations (Fairclough,
1997). In Language and Power (2001), Fairclough mentions “power in discourse” and
“power behind discourse”. In terms of “power in discourse”, discourse is the site of
struggle, and in terms of “power behind discourse”, it is the stake in power struggle – for
control over orders of discourse is a powerful mechanism for sustaining power.
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Fairclough (ibid:61) shows three types of constraint which powerful participants in
discourse can exercise over the contributions of non-powerful participants: constraints on
contents (on what it is said or done), constraints on relations ( the social relations people
enter into discourse) and constraints on subject ( subject position people can occupy
according to their social relation and status). When these constraints are thought of in a
relatively ‘structural’ and long-term way as a matter of power behind discourse – that is, a
matter of the conventions of discourse types constraining participants’ contributions in
these three ways – they may have long-term structural effects on an institutions or society.
(Figure 2. Fairclough, 2001,62).
Constraints
Structural effects
Contents
Knowledge and beliefs
Relations
Social relationships
Subjects
Social identities
Table 1: Constraints on discourse and structural effects
For CDA, language is not powerful on its own. In fact, it gains power by the use powerful
people make of it. This explains why CDA often chooses the perspective of those who
suffer, and crtically analyses the language use of those in power. “CDA takes the
experiences and opinions of members of such groups seriously, and supports their struggle
against inequality. That is, CDA research combines what perhaps somewhat pompously
used to be called ‘solidarity with the oppressed’ with an attitude of opposition and dissent
against those who abuse text and talk in order to establish, confirm or legitimate their
abuse of power. Unlike much other scholarship, CDA does not deny but explicitly defines
and defends its own sociopolitical position. That is, CDA is biased – and proud of it”
(Teun van Dijk, Multidisciplinary CDA: a plea for diversity collected by Ruth Wodak &
Michael Meyer (Eds.), 2001: 96).
Fairclough and Wodak (1997) offered eight foundational principles of CDA. These
principles are a useful starting point for researchers interested in conducting CDA. They
include:

CDA addresses social problems

Power relations are discursive

Discourse constitutes society and culture
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
Discourse does ideological work

Discourse is historical

A sociocognitive approach is needed to understand how relations between texts and
society are mediated

Discourse analysis is interpretive and axplanatory and uses a systematic
methodology

CDA is a socially committed scientific paradigm
(taken from Rogers, R. 2004)
CDA as an approach is of an important role in social scientific research. Researchers who
are interested in the relationship between language and society use CDA to help them
describe, interpret and explain such relationship. CDA is different from other other
discourse analysis methods because it includes not only a description and interpretation of
discourse in context, but also offers an explanation of why and how discourses work.
To put it more specifically, CDA addresses social problems and seeks to solve social
problems through the analysis and accompanying social and political action. The intention
of the critical discourse analysts is locating social problems and analyzing how discourse
operates to construct and is historically constructed by such issues. In this perspective,
analysts believe that analyzing texts for power is not enough to disrupt such discursive
powers. Instead, the analysis must work from the analysis of texts to the social and
political contexts in which the texts emerge.
Before the analysis of texts begins, it is often thought that data collection is the first phase
that must be completed. However, there is no typical CDA way of collecting data, and in
the contributions of Van Dijk and Norman Fairclough, there is no evidence concerning
data collection requirements. In CDA many studies mostly deal with only small corpora
which are usually regarded as being typical of certain discourses. So, to identify
participants and mediational means which are relevant for the research question, doing
surveys may be one suitable way. The surveys should narrow down the scope of the
research to a few highly salient places or scenes, in which the actions interested in are
taking place. Besides, surveys aim to identify the specific social actions taking place within
the scenes we have identified which are of relevance to the study of mediated action.
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In the surveys, focus groups should also be identified and thoroughly analyzed. The
purpose of such groups at this stage is twofold: The researcher wants to know to what
extent the identification of specific scenes, media, and actions have reliability and validity
for members of the group under study, and they wants to understand how important or
salient the categories which have been identified are for the population being studied as
well. (Scollon, 2001: 158)
In terms of textual analysis, CDA strongly relies on linguistic categories. This does not
mean that topics play no role at all, but that the core operationalizations depend on
linguistic concepts such as actors, mode, time, tense, argumentation, etc. Van Dijk suggests
that the analysis should concentrate upon the following linguistic markers: Stress and
intonation, word order, lexical style, coherence, local semantic moves, topic choice,
speech acts, schematic organization, rhetorical figures, syntactic structures, turn takings,
repairs, hesitation.
Norman Fairclough in his book Language and Power (2001) provides a more detailed and
clearer method. In his opinion, “The systemic-functional theory of language is particularly
helpful in textual analysis (Halliday 1978; 1985; Hodge and Kress 1988; Thibault 1991),
both because its approach to studying grammar and other aspects of language form is a
functional one, and because it is systematically orientated to studying the relationship
between the texture of texts and their social contexts” and “Systemic-functional linguistics
also has a view of texts which is a potentially powerful basis not only for analysis of what
is in texts, but also for analysis of what is absent or omitted from texts.” (Fairclough,
Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis, 1992) As a result, Fairclough
suggests first of all structural analysis of the context, and secondly interactional analysis,
which focuses on linguistic features such as: agents, time, tense, modality, and syntax.
More concretely, he sets out three stages of CDA as follows.
Three stages of CDA are description, interpretation and explanation. Description is the
stage which is concerned with the formal properties of the text. Interpretation is concerned
with the relationship between text and interaction – with seeing the text as a product of a
process of production, and as a resource in the process of interpretation. And explanation is
concerned with the relationship between interaction and social context – with the social
determination of the processes of production and interpretation, and their social effects.
Fairclough (2001: 21-2)
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In the first stage, ten main questions and a number of sub-questions introduced by
Fairclough could be useful when analysing a text in terms of formal features. This is not
intended as an exhaustive or all-encompassing list, but is a suggested list of possible
directions or areas that could be investigated. The ten questions are divided into three main
groups:
A. Vocabulary
1. What experiential values do words have?
What classification schemes are drawn upon?
Are there words which are ideologically contested?
Is there rewording or overwording?
What ideologically significant meaning relations (synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy)
are there between words?
2 What relational values do words have?
Are there euphemistic expressions?
Are there markedly formal or informal words?
3. What expressive values do words have?
4. What metaphors are used?
B. Grammar
5. What experiential values do grammatical features have?
What types of process and participants predominate?
Is agency unclear?
Are processes what they seem?
Are normalizations used?
Are sentences active or passive?
Are sentences positive or negative?
6. What relational values do grammatical features have?
What modes (declarative, grammatical question, imperative) are used?
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Are there important features of relational modality?
Are the pronouns we and you used and if so, how?
7. What expressive values do grammatical features have?
Are there important features of expressive modality?
8. How are (simple) sentences linked together?
What logical connectors are used?
Are complex sentences characterized by coordination or/ subordination?
What means are used for referring inside and outside the text?
C. Textual structures
9. What interactional conventions are used?
Are there ways in which one participant controls the turns of others?
10. What larger scale structures does the text have?
Fairclough (2001: 92-3)
The definitions of three terms: experiential, relational and expressive, are of great
importance to the understanding of the framework. In Language and Power (2001),
Fairclough claimed that formal features of texts have experiential, relational, expressive or
connective value, or some combination of these. By looking at experiential values CDA
attempts to show how ‘the text producer’s experience of the natural or social world’ (ibid:
93) effects and is shown in a text. A person’s views of the world can be identified by
assessing formal features with experiential value. Relational values may identify the
perceived social relationship between the producer of the text and its recipient. The third
dimension, expressive value, provides an insight into ‘the producer’s evaluation (in the
widest sense) of the bit of the reality it relates to.’ (ibid: 93) This should identify the
relevant parties to the text’s social identities. Fairclough (2002: 93) goes on to identify
another value that any formal feature may possess, connective value, as its function may be
to connect together parts of a text. He also stresses that ‘any given formal feature may
simultaneously have two or three of these values’ (ibid: 93). However, in my opinion,
Fairclough’s list of questions seems capable of generating an astonishing amount of
analysis and it may be less suitable for larger quantities of text.
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The three values of formal features of texts are connected with three aspects of social
practice which may be constrained by power (contents, relations and subjects) and their
associated structural effects (on knowledge and beliefs, social relationships, and social
identities) (Fairclough, 2001).However, it is obvious that one cannot directly infer from the
formal features of a text to structural effects upon the constitution of a society. Values of
textual features only become real when they are put in social interaction. In other words,
texts are produced and interpreted against the background of common-sense assumptions
(part of members’ resources - MR). Here, the second stage interpretation is needed to deal
with these discourse processes and their dependence on background assumptions. A
summary of interpretative procedures are shown in Figure 2.
Explanation is the third stage in CDA. According to Fairclough, the objective of this stage
is to portray a discourse as part of a social process, as a social practice. It tries to show how
discourses are determined by social structures, and what reproductive effects discourses
can have on those structures, sustaining them or changing them. These social
determinations and effects are mediated by MR: that is social structures shape MR while
MR in turn shape discourses; and discourses sustain or change MR, which in turn sustain
or change structures. These processes can be summarized in Figure 3.
As a fairly new branch of linguistics, CDA also receives many criticisms. Critics like
Widdowson (1995), who favors pragmatic approach to discourse analysis, object that CDA
“constantly sits on the fence between social research and political argumentation”.
Widdowson also criticizes the lack of a clear-cut difference between discourse and text in
CDA. And the most noteworthy thing, however, is his criticism that as CDA is an
ideological interpretation, it is not an analysis and therefore the term critical discourse
analysis is a contradiction in itself.
Despite criticisms, CDA is attracting more and more attention of linguists because CDA, in
the majority of cases, sides with the underprivileged, the dominated and attempts to reveal
the linguistic means employed by the powerful, privileged people to stabilize and even
intensify inequalities in society. CDA is undeniably the first approach to language that
practically serves the human beings.
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Social orders
Situational context
Interactional history
Intertextual context
Phonology, grammar,
vocabulary
Source of utterance
Semantics,
Pragmatics
Meaning of utterance
Cohesion,
Pragmatics
Local coherence
Schemata
Text structure and point
Figure 2: Interpretation (Fairclough, 2001:119)
Societal
Institutional
Societal
MR
Discourse
MR
Situational
Determinants
Institutional
Situational
Effects
Figure 3: Explanation (Fairclough, 2001:136)
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1.2. Systemic Functional Linguistics and its role in CDA.
As Fairclough’s model is chosen as a base for my study, his method and analyzing
procedure have been presented in detail. Besides Fairclough’s model, Halliday’s Systemic
Functional Linguistics (SFL) is also taken into account and the following part is a brief
look at SFL and the reason why and how it is used in CDA.
SFL says that we perform functions through language, i.e. what we intend to do with a
piece of language. Clearly, speakers have reasons for saying something and for saying it in
the way they do. As a result, speakers have to make choices. SFL sets out to investigate
what the range of relevant choices are, both in the kinds of meanings that we might want to
express (or functions that we might want to perform) and in the kinds of wording that we
use to express these meanings, and to match these two sets of choices.
However, the term ‘choice’ does not necessarily imply a conscious process of selection by
the speaker, what SFL aims to uncover a functional analysis are the reasons why the
speaker produces a particular wording rather than any other in a particular context. What,
in a kind of society we live in, do we typically need or want to say? What are the
contextual factors which make one set of meanings more appropriate or likely to be
expressed than another?
It now can be seen that both CDA and SFL approach functionally to textual analysis
through studying grammar and other aspects of language form, and they are systematically
orientated to studying the relationship between the texture of texts and their social contexts.
This also explains why SFL is of great help in doing CDA.
Within SFL, three kinds of meaning (or functions) have been identified: (Thompson, 1996)
1. We use language to talk about our experience of the world, including the worlds in
our own minds, to describe events and states and the entities involved in them
(experiential meaning).
2. We also use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain
relations with them, to influence their behaviour, to express our own viewpoint on
things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs (interpersonal meaning).
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3. Finally, we organize our message in ways which indicate how they fit in with the
other messages around them and with the wider context in which we are talking or
writing (textual meaning).
The unit for analyzing the meanings at the lexico-grammatical level is clause.
The Experiential meaning is realized through the System of Process Types (or
Transitivity system). The experiential meaning is the means of representing reality in the
linguistic system. It answers the question “What is going on?”. And the language has the
function to express the experiential aspect of the meaning through the system of transitivity.
The system of transitivity consists of different process types, participants and
circumstances. In English, six process types are recognized: material process, behaviour
process, mental process, verbal process, relational process, and existential process.
Material process is the process of doing things; express notion that some entity ‘does’
something, which may be done to some other entity. Behavioural process is the process of
physiological and psychological behaviour such as breathing, crying, drinking…Mental
process is a kind of activity in people’s mind, requires a conscious participant such as
thinking, loving, wanting, hearing. Verbal process is the process of saying such as saying,
telling, speaking, talking. Relational process is the process of ‘being’, ‘having’ and ‘being
at’ in form of three subtypes: the intensive, the possessive, and the circumstantial.
Existential process is the process of existing, indicating that something or some natural
force exists. Table 2 is an overview of these processes.
Process types
Category
Participants
Example
meanings
Material :
Action
‘doing’
Actor, Goal, Recipient
‘doing’
The mayor dissolved the
committee.
Event
‘happening’
The mayor resigned.
Behavioural :
‘behaving’
Behaver, (Phenomenon)
Mental:
‘feeling’
Sensor, Phenomenon
She cried softly.
Perception
‘sensing’
I heard a noise outside.
Affection
‘emotive’
The boy loved the girl.
Cognition
‘thinking’
You
can
reaction.
imagine
his
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‘saying’
Verbal:
Relational:
Sayer, Target, Verbiage, I explained to her what it
Recipient
meant.
Carrirer, Attribute
This bread is stale.
‘being’
Attribution
‘attributing’
Identification
‘identifying’ Identified, Identifier/
Pat is her brother.
Value, Token
Existential:
‘existing’
Maybe there’s some other
Existent
darker pattern.
Table 2: Overview of process types (adapted from Halliday, 1994)
The Interpersonal Meaning is realized through the Mood Structure. Through
Interpersonal meaning, we answer the question “How do we use language to exchange?”
Besides Mood structure, Thompson (1996) offers kinds of areas to be explored in the
analysis of Interpersonal meaning in text and these areas seem useful in my textual analysis.
modality
personal
evaluation
Interpersonal
enacted roles (speech roles)
interactive
projected roles
Figure 4: Aspects of interpersonal management. (Thompson,1996:69)
The first factor I would like to mention in the figure is speech roles. When a speaker
interacts with others to exchange information or to influence their behaviour and get things
done, he inevitably adopts for himself a certain role such as ‘questioner’ and, in doing so,
simultaneously assigns a corresponding role, such as ‘informant’, to the other person.
Halliday (1994) provides a table to characterize the primary speech roles as follows.
21
Commodity
exchange
Role in exchange
(i) giving
(a) goods -&- services
(b) information
Offer
Would you like this teapot?
Statement
He is giving her the
teapot.
Question
What is he giving her?
(ii) demanding
Command
Give me that teapot!
Table 3: Primary speech roles (Halliday, 1994:69)
However, the speaker may also project a role on to himself/herself or the other person by
the way he/she talks about them. This is clearest with naming, where the way that the
speaker names the other person indicates how he/she thinks of that other person. For
example: Reader, I married him.
In textual analysis, modality is paid much attention to. While the Mood is concerned with
Yes/No, semantically there are intermediate stages – points between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ such as
‘maybe’ or ‘sometimes’ or ‘susposedly’ – which are expressed by modality.
If the commodity being exchanged is information, the modality relates to how valid the
information is in terms of probability (how likely it is to be true) or usuality (how
frequently it is true. Some of the basic points on the probability scale are: possible /
probable / certain; on the usuality scale, they include: sometimes / often / always.
On the other hand, if the commodity is goods-&services, the modality relates to how
confident the speaker can be in the eventual success of the exchange. In commands, this
concerns the degree of obligation on the other person to carry out the command (the scale
includes permissible / advisable / obligatory). In offers, the modality concerns the degree
of willingness or inclination of the speaker to fulfill the offer (the speaker may signal:
ability/ willingness / determination).
Evaluation is the last factor to be mentioned in studying interpersonal meaning. According
to Thompson (1996), evaluation is the indication of whether the speaker thinks that
something (a person, a thing…) is good or bad. The good or bad scale can be seen as the
simplest and most basic one and there are many other scales of evaluation. Represented
through lexical choices, evaluation is the central part of the meaning of any text and text
analysis must take it into account.
22
In terms of Textual meaning, thematic structure is under investigation. The textual
meaning deals with creating relevance between parts of what is being said and between the
text and the context. It asks “How the content of the text organized?” Lexicogrammatically, it is expressed through the system of theme and information focus.
Relevant to the realization of the system of theme are two elements: the Theme and the
Rheme. The Theme serves as the point of departure of the message, which in English is
initial elements of the clause; and the Rheme is the remainder of the message. By
analyzing the thematic structure of the clauses in a text we can find out the text’s mode of
development, i.e. how speakers construct their messages in a way which makes them
smoothly fit into the unfolding language event.
A theme is single when the thematic element itself is presented by just one constituent – a
nominal group, an adverbial group, or a prepositional phrase, or even a clause in the case
of predicated theme. Meanwhile, the theme is multiple when it has further internal
structure of its own. The following is the summary of components of multiple theme.
Metafunction
Components of theme
Example
Experiential
Topical elements (participant, circumstances, Elements
theme
process)
playing
as
Actor / Agent , Goal /
Medium, Circumstance
in the clause
Textual
Continuative elements
theme
Structural
elements
Yes, no, well…
(conjunction
relative)
or
WH- And, but…
Also, therefore…
Conjunctive elements (Adjunct)
Interpersonal
Modal (adjunct)
Surely, maybe…
theme
Finite (operator)
Don’t, would…
WH – (interrogative)
What, who…
Vocative element
Soldier, Ann…
Table 4: Components of a multiple theme (adapted from Halliday, 1994:54)
23
Example:
don’t
please
doctor
modal
vocative finite
interpersonal
give
me any more of that nasty medicine
topical
experiential
Rheme
Theme
Theme may be marked or unmarked. An unmarked theme is one that is usual or typical,
whereas a marked theme is one that is unusual. Unmarked theme choice can be understood
by considering the communicative purpose. Thus, in the declarative clause, an unmarked
theme is one that conflates with the subject, while a marked theme is a constituent
functioning as some element of the Residue: Complement, Adjunct or even Predicator.
Similarly, in non-declarative clauses, a marked theme choice in a WH-question is when the
WH-word or group does not come in first position, and more commonly in imperative
clauses with the use of ‘you’.
In brief, the textual and interpersonal elements signal how the fitting-in (placing the
content) is going to work. In a sense, they indicate the location of the starting-point in the
text’s semantic space without in themselves constituting the starting-point. Experiential
content of the clause is the actual staring-point of the clause and it tells what is going to be
fitted in.
Looking at Theme in a broader perspective, and to explore how Theme choices work
together through a text to signal its underlying coherence, there are four possible main,
related functions: (Thompson, 1996)
1. Signalling the maintenance or progression of ‘what the text is about’ at that point.
This is especially done through the choice of Subject as unmarked Theme:
maintenance is done by keeping to the same Theme as preceding clause,
progression often by selecting a constituent from the preceding Rheme.
2. Specifying or changing the framework for the interpretation of the following clause
(or clauses). This is mostly done by the choice of marked Theme, especially
Adjunct, or a thematic equative or predicated Theme. A ‘heavy’ Subject theme,
giving a large amount of information, can also be used for this purpose.
24
3. Signalling the boundaries of sections in the text. This is often done by changing
from one type of Theme choice to another.
4. Signalling what the speaker thinks is a viable/ useful / important starting point. This
is done by repeatedly choosing the same element to appear in Theme (a particular
participant, the speaker’s evaluation, elements which signal interaction with the
hearer, etc.)
The above-mentioned functions of language have been proved to be useful in many
discourse analyses. In addition, there is one aspect that I found of particular importance to
my analysis of the text. It is the macrostructure of text. In Halliday ‘s viewpoint, the
macrostructure represents relations between blocks of sentences and the global
organization of texts, while the microstructure represents the relations between sequences
in actual text. The macrostructure of a text can be understood as the construction of global
organizational patterns. As communicative purpose plays an important role in determining
the macrostructure for writers/ speakers, when doing CDA, one cannot ignore mentioning
how ideology is revealed in the writer/ speaker’s choice of the text’s overall scheme.
25
Chapter 2:
A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
OF MARTIN LUTHER KING’S SPEECH:
‘Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence’.
2.1. Textual description and Analysis
2.1.1. Analysis in terms of vocabulary
Text analysis is an indispensable process in discourse analysis generally and in CDA
particularly. As given by Faiclough (1989), the first stage in text analysis is description to
find out linguistic features such as features of vocabulary, grammar, types of speech act,
the directness or indirectness of expression and features to do with the overall structure of
interactions. All these features will finally lead to the uncovering of power relations and
ideological processes in discourse. The analysis of vocabulary used is undeniably
important. According to Van Dijk (Wodak, R. and Meyer, M., 2001), lexical meanings (or
“local meanings’ depending on Van Dijk’s perspective) are the result of the selection made
by speakers or writers in mental models of events (their personally relevant beliefs about
an event, that is, knowledge, opinions and probably emotions) or their more general,
socially shared beliefs. At the same time, they are the kind of information that (under the
overall control of global topics) most directly influences the mental models, and hence the
opinions and attitudes of recipients. Together with the topics, these meanings are best
recalled and most easily reproduced by recipients, and hence may have most obvious social
consequences.
Although there are many ways to study meaning, Fairclough’s approach is chosen because
of its more detailed features. The vocabulary will be explored in terms of experiential,
relational, and expressive values. Experiential value deals with contents and knowledge
and beliefs. Relational value reveals relations and social relationships which are enacted
via the text in the discourse. And expressive value concerns subjects and social identities.
Apart from this, connective value which connects parts of the text together is also analyzed.
My job now is to see how these values are expressed in the vocabulary use of Martin
26
Luther King. Before analyzing the text, it is also important to note that the text within
single asterisks is absent from the audio while other media printed the full text. King may
have for some reason left out those parts while delivering the speech, but because everyone
including those at the meeting can read the full text, I take the full text for my analysis
while paying attention to King’s intention when he omitted those texts as well.
Any communicative event involves the speaker and the audience. Let’s look at the speaker
first. The speaker here is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (often called King) (January 15,
1929 – April 4, 1968) who was an American political activist, the most famous leader of
the American civil rights movement, and a Baptist minister. Considered as a peacemaker
throughout the world for his promotion of nonviolence and equal treatment for different
races, King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 before he was assassinated in 1968.
The identity of the speaker is mentioned several times in the King’s speech.
“…the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery,
Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight…”
(line 38, 39)
“Since I am a preacher by trade…” (line 52)
“…and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a
commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of
man.” (line 111, 112)
“I speak as a citizen of the world…” (line 278)
“I speak as one who loves America…” (line 279)
The identity as an activist for the American civil rights movement is tacitly referred to:
“At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why
are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of
dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say.” (line 30-32)
As told by King, in many people’s viewpoint, peace and civil rights are two different facets,
and they are surprised when King talked about the war while he is the leader of the civil
rights movement in their mind.
When all the identities of the speaker are defined, analyzing other linguistic features of the
text becomes a bit easier.
27
The speaker has to set up a position for typified audience. The audience Martin Luther
King addressed is rather obvious in different parts of the text either directly or indirectly.
This speech was delivered in 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at
Riverside Church in New York City and the audience is clarified in the very first place of
the speech.
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves
me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement
with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy
and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam.”
The first and direct audience of the speech is those at the meeting regardless of their
identities as clergy or laymen who are not the members of the clergy. However, they all
share the common concern about Vietnam. King himself once more emphasizes the type of
audience his speech is aimed at when saying:
“Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation
Front, but rather to my fellowed Americans.” (line 49-50)
King addresses his audience as my fellowed Americans and the scope of his audience is
now bigger. In the original text, King wrote: “Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with
Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellowed Americans, *who, with
me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on
both continents” but in his speech, the part “who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility
in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents” was omitted.
Everyone who is American should listen to his voice when he breaks the silence, listen to
his ‘passionate plea to a beloved nation’ (line 40). Pragmatically, ‘my fellowed Americans’
implies all Americans to be a unified block when he calls for action. Interestingly, although
the plea is directed at fellowed Americans, it is also directly addressed to a relevant
destinatary: the government.
“I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation…” (line 279)
“I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately…” (line 301)
With the use of vocative and referring phrases, the targeted hearers are set unambiguous
throughout different parts of the speech.
28
As a pastor and leader of the civil rights movement talking to the U.S. people, King has
show the formality of the social relations in a formal situation (a meeting of Clergy and
Laymen concerned about Vietnam). Through the relational values of vocabulary, word
choice becomes an effective tool for him to demonstrates the formality. Easily seen are
some formal words which are chosen instead of informal ones.
(line 2)
in deepest agreement with
(line 05)
I found myself in full record
(line 13)
perplexed
(line 14)
on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty
(line 17)
vocation of agony
(line 19)
rejoice
(line 22)
mandate of conscience
(line 29)
this query
(line 95)
descendants
(line 110)
burden of responsibility
(line 255)
overtures for peace
(line 300)
bring a halt to
(line 392)
molding a recalcitrant status quo
(line 447)
unfolding conundrum of life and history
(line 448)
procrastination
The use of formal language shows the proper manner of a politician, appropriate politeness
of an important meeting and reveals speaker’s concern about the face of participants
including him. The formality also emphasizes the importance of the speech and thus
attracts the attention of listeners. And all of these influences of formality is not beyond
King’s ideological intention.
Adding some degree of the formal atmosphere to the speech are words relating to religion.
It is not difficult to see that the God is mentioned in many parts of the speech in several
forms:
Jesus Christ (line 115)
the One (line 119)
the living God (line 125, 346)
the Father (line 127)
29
God (line 274)
the God Samaritan (line 369)
In addition, there are words expressing the church directly or indirectly:
conformist (line 12)
pray (line 23)
sanctuary (line 39)
cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love (line 386)
ecumenical (line 422)
sectional (line 422)
epistle (line 435)
worship the god of hate (line 439)
bow before the altar of retaliation (line 439)
crusade against the war in Vietnam (line 335)
psalm of peace (line 480)
Even they are original phrases quoted from the Bible:
…the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And
every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth
not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love
is perfected in us." (line 435-438)
“every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and
the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain." (line 418-420)
Although the speech is not a sermon in a church, a solemn atmosphere has been created.
Besides, intentionally or unintentionally used, all these words imply King’s career. In other
words, throughout the speech, they remind listeners of King as not movement leader but a
pastor who serves the God, and on behalf of the God serves American people. Breaking the
silence becomes a duty assigned by the God. King himself affirmed this when he says: “I
would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ.
To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious” (line 115).
The speech becomes more persuasive when it comes from the heart of a person who
servers others or their profits and when people feel that it is natural and compelling for
anyone who believes in God to follow and do what God says.
30
From CDA theory, we know that lexical meanings are the result of the selection made by
speakers or writers from members’ resources (Fairclough, 2001). In other words, the words
chosen are nor anywhere else but in their personally knowledge, opinions and probably
emotions with experiential values and expressive values. And vice versa, those words are
evidence for their ideology.
As mentioned, experiential values show the speaker’s view of the world or his negative or
positive attitude towards an issue while the expressive values show how the speaker’s
evaluation is expressed. In analyzing these values, Fairclough (2002) suggests
classification schemes i.e. system in terms of which vocabulary is organized. As both
experiential and expressive values can be referred to through classification schemes, they
will be at the same time analyzed in the following part.
Salient in the speech is a classification scheme describing King’s negative attitude towards
the war in Vietnam. Negative words are used again and again in the speech. Firstly, they
are definitions assigned to the war.
(line 14)
dreadful conflict
(line 42)
ambiguity of the total situation
(line 43)
tragedy of Vietnam
(line 63)
demonic destructive suction tube
(line 84)
masses doses of violence
(line 149)
tragic decision
(line 160)
tragic attempt
(line 268)
brutalizing process
(line 294)
horrible, clumsy and deadly game
(line 300)
this tragic war
(line 303)
nightmarish conflict
(line 328)
a dishonorable and unjust one
(line 332)
folly
(line 338)
a symptom of a far deeper malady within
the American spirit
(line 339)
sobering reality
No flattering words are used. Strongly negative words are applied. King describes this war
as dreadful, demonic, destructive, tragic, horrible, clumsy and deadly, nightmarish. It is
31
clear to King and to listeners that this war brings nothing good for the people involved.
Especially, King uses the word demonic when talking of the war. As a pastor, fighting
against something demonic is a duty and it is also the duty for all believing in the God and
in the good. These words are not only the negative attitude of King toward the war but also
an implicit call to fight against this terrible war. “This business of burning human beings
with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous
drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark
and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be
reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.” (line 382-386)
To engrave the natural terrible nature of the war, two ideological contrastive classification
schemes are employed in the description of the war involvers. In King’s experiential world,
there are two contrastive sides in the Vietnam war. One side is the America and Diem’s
regime and one side is the Vietnamese people who “have been living under the curse of
war for almost three continuous decades” (line 138).
Table 5: Two ideological contrastive classification schemes
the America and Diem’s regime
the Vietnamese people
murderous reign of Diem (line 214)
trembling under.. violence (line 89)
tremendous cost (line 243)
their broken cries (line 140)
ruthlessly rooted out all opposition (line 166)
watched and cringed (line 166)
support extortionist landlords (line 167)
insurgency (line 170)
poison their water (line 181-184)
languish under bombs (line 176)
kill a million acres of their crops. (line 181-184)
wander into the hospitals with at least
bulldozers roar through … areas preparing to twenty casualties from American firepower
destroy the precious trees. (line 181-184)
for one Vietcong-inflicted injury (line 184)
killed a million of them, mostly children. (line 181- see thousands of the children, homeless,
184)
without clothes, running in packs on the
test latest weapons (line 192)
streets like animals (line 184-189)
destroyed two most cherished institutions: the family see the children degraded … as they beg for
and the village (line 195)
food. (line 184-189)
computerized plans of destruction (line 218)
see the children selling their sisters to our
emerge a pattern of suppression (line 350)
soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. (line
184-189)
32
King only mentions the word ‘victim’ once in line 132, then he talks of Vietnamese people
as “the peasants”, “people of that peninsular”. However, it is obvious from the above table
that who is victim of the war and who causes the misery to the victims. No words in the
speech mention which side Kings supports, which side King opposes but it seems he more
favors the miserable people of Vietnam in the war who are the voiless, who are one of the
reasons for which he breaks the silence.
Another victim of the Vietnam war is also concerned – the poor in America. In King’s
opinion, “the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home” (line
65) and is seen as “the enemy of the poor” (line 63). Not many words are used but their
experiential and expressive value is prominent:
The poverty program becomes broken and eviscerated (line 59)
young men…crippled by our society (line 69)
cruel manipulation of the poor (line 76)
desperate, rejected, and angry young man (line 79)
smashed hopes (line 277)
The antiwar ideology is not only an explicit call for a crusade against the war in Vietnam
(line 335), it becomes stronger when the victims of the war both in Vietnam and America
are so pitiful and helpless.
King’s attitude to the American government is also worth being analyzed to see the
experiential and expressive values of the vocabulary. Most actions of the government
concerned here relates to the Vietnam War. In other words, King shows what the American
government did to the war.
(line 169)
…all this was presided over by the United states’ influence …
(line 170)
…increasing numbers of United States troops who came to
help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused
(line 165)
support one of the most vicious modern dictators
(line 209)
permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem
(line 211)
condoning the violence
(line 245)
conspire with Diem
(line 320)
disgraceful commitment with Diem’s regime
33
King opposes to the government’s involvement in the war when he considers it a
disgraceful commitment. In his belief, his knowledge, the government has been
wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam (line 296)
detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people (line 297)
on the wrong side of the world revolution (line 349)
….. fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international
atmosphere for so long (line 148)
And King overtly calls the American government “strange liberators” (line 141) and “the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” (line 87)
Time magazine at that time called King’s speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a
script for Radio Hanoi" as there are no allusions to outside authorities but direct naming.
However, what King says simply comes from his own experiential world. He calls the
American government “the greatest purveyor of violence” from the viewpoint of a
peacemaker who favors nonviolence. King criticizes the government as what the
government does is encouraging violence. He also implicitly reminds people of his motives
“social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action” (line 82)
Throughout the words revealing the reality and King’s attitude toward the reality, it cannot
be denied that word meanings are ideologically embedded. Besides classification schemes,
the relations of antonymy are also found in the text. In many places, antonymous phrases
and clauses are used and put in parallel structures.
communist
line 118
><
capitalist
line 118
black
line 118
><
white
line 118
revolutionary
line 118
><
conservative
line 118
the privilege
line 129
><
the burden
line 129
refuse to recognize them
line 145
><
support France
line 146
denied
line 154
><
support
line 155
by China
line 151
><
by clearly indigenous forces
line 151
independence and land reform line 162
><
But instead there came the line 163
would come again…
rooted out all opposition
United States…
line 166
><
supported their extortionist line 167
landlords
34
ally ….
line 191
><
Refuse
crushing … the nation's only line 197
><
supported the enemies of the line 198
noncommunist
political
revolutionary
force,
the
line 191
peasants of Saigon.
unified
Buddhist Church
free elections …
line 124
><
is censored and controlled
we charge them with violence
line 215
><
we pour every new weapon
while
line124
of death into their land
spoken of peace
line 257
><
built up its forces
the most powerful nation of the line 261
><
it drops thousands of bombs line 262
world speaking of aggression
line 257
on a poor, weak nation more
than
eight thousand miles
away from its shores.
poverty
line 375
><
wealth
line 375
take profits out
line 377
><
no concern for the social line 377
betterment of the countries
past
line 368
><
present
line 368
it has everything to teach other
line 380
><
nothing to learn from them
line 380
pursuit of peace….
line 391
><
pursuit of war
line 391
old systems of exploitation and line 405
><
new systems of justice and line 405
oppression
line 406
><
equality
line 406
sat in darkness
line 407
><
… seen great light
line 407
the line 411
><
become
initiated
so
much
of
revolutionary spirit
the
arch line 411
antirevolutionaries
ecumenical
line 422
><
sectional (line 422)
line 422
nations and
line 441
><
individuals
line 441
remain at flood….
line 450
><
ebbs
line 450
our vigilance or
line 454
><
our neglect
line 454
nonviolent coexistence
line 456
><
violent
line 456
Antonymous pairs are a special textual feature which is often used in rhetoric speeches.
When giving a contrastive sense, the speaker adds one more emphatic level to the ideas in
focus and creates very strong effects on the ‘taking-in’ of the audience. This feature helps
form the impressive tune of the speech, attract the attention of the listeners and positively
35
trigger listeners’ thinking. The speech becomes more persuasive and the messages
conveyed can be easily got across. Now, it can be said that the use of antonyms has more
to do with expressive values than experiential values. It is clearly more concerned with the
effects of the text on the audience than with the speaker’s view of the world. And surely,
the use of this textual feature is also within the ideological basis.
2.1.2. Analysis in terms of grammar features
2.1.2.1. The use of personal pronoun
In the discussion of relational values of grammatical features, Fairclough mentions the use
of pronouns we, you. The statistical table of the use of We can be seen in Appendix II
(page VIII).
There are 128 instances of we. However, only four cases of we are exclusive while in 124
other cases, we is inclusive. In the four exclusive cases of we, King refers to his group
when they formed the Southern Leadership Conference. But the relational values lie in
‘inclusive’ we, inclusive that is of the speaker and the audience. King implies he and the
audience – those at the meeting and American people – are on the same boat, which helps
create a solidarity sense, firstly among those present. With ‘inclusive’ we, the duty of the
speaker is also the duty of the audience. The opinion of the speaker naturally becomes the
common idea of all. Kings aims at finding the approval and opinion sharing from the
audience. Regarding activities of the U.S. government in the Vietnam War, King still uses
we. Obviously, King opposes to the government’s involvement in Vietnam but he does not
exclude himself and others from those activities. King shows his goodwill here. He feels
responsible for that involvement and he wants others to feel the same when they kept silent,
they did not raise their voice before. The use of we becomes the premise connecting people
when the call for action is given.
The pronoun you is not common in King’s speech (five cases) and it does not show much
relational value. Thus, I spend more time on the first personal pronoun singular I (see
Appendix 3, page XVI). 69 instances of I are found in this speech. In these cases, King sets
a subject position for himself as an individual – a pastor and leader of the civil rights
movement. When using I, King separates himself from the crowd talking to the crowd and
becomes outstanding. This shows King’s self-confidence and credibility. The audience
36
feels the speech more persuasive when talking to them firstly is an individual who can bear
responsibility for what he says.
2.1.2.2. The use of voice
In grammatical features, both Faiclough (2001) and Van Dijk (Wodak, R. and Meyer, M.,
2001) see the importance in the choice of active or passive voice. According to Van Dijk
(Wodak, R. and Meyer, M., 2001), these forms generally do not directly express
underlying meanings and hence beliefs, but rather signal ‘pragmatic’ properties of a
communicative event, such as the intention, current mode or emotions of the speaker, their
perspective on events talked about, opinions about co-participants, and especially
interactional concerns such as positive self-presentation and impression formation. In
King’s speech, among 465 clauses are 53 passive clauses, accounting for 11.4% of the total
clauses. That means in most cases, the agent is clear. The audience can easily see who did
what and to whom. In terms of message convey, King creates the clarity to the audience of
what he wants them to know. Maybe in his mind, to a variety of audience, a large number
of active voices mean minimizing the ambiguity and misunderstanding. Naturally, for
those reasons, the use of passive clauses is of important implication (see Appendix 4, page
XVIII).
It is necessary to notice that in many passive clauses, the agent is not omitted. It appears at
the end of the clause after the preposition “by”. King implies that it is the agent not
anything else causing the action. This kind of emphasis is especially used in the following
cases when the actions are negative actions. An impression may be deeply carved in
listeners’ mind that who or what has to be responsible for this. As they are negative actions,
a sense against them may arise.
line 69
the black young men who had been crippled by our society…
line 168
all this was presided over by United States' influence…
line 180
they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
line 224
the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta.
line 241
…the men who …and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the
colonial armies.
line 395
Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons.
line 440
The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate.
37
In many other cases, the agent is left out. Although there is no agent, the clause doesn’t
puzzle the audience as the audience from the context, from their own knowledge can infer
the doer, or the agent of that action is not necessary mentioned at all. Behind the omission
of the agent is the ideology. The audience will pay more attention to the message. In other
words, the ideology is in the emphasis on the patient (one that suffers or undergoes the
process - SFL) and action. The following sentences are some examples.
line 95
America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves
were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.
line 105
It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
line 201
Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military
bases
line 293
the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible,
clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play.
line 386
This business of burning human beings… cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice,
and love.
line 459
If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful
corridors of time
There is a sense that these statements have been made as if they are generally known truth.
The agent is not important. The whole sentence is the event that the speaker wants to
convey and wants the audience to pay attention to. In line 95, 201, 293 and 495, it seems
that those events do not belong to the future but be present in front of the listeners, and if
so, they are the facts that no one would want it to happen. Passive voice effectively shows
the urgency of the matter.
In a nutshell, using the passive sentences, the speaker does not obscure the meaning of the
message, and besides the emphatic effects, the passive voice may create additional
meaning to the sentence when its focal point is the patient and the process. The experiential
values of the passive voice are obvious.
2.1.2.3. Modes of the sentence
As suggested by Fairclough (2001, p104), there are three major modes: declarative,
grammatical question and imperative. In grammatical questions, there are two types: whquestions and yes/no-questions. All these modes appear in King’s speech. Among 294
38
sentences, 267 sentences have declarative mode, 22 sentences are questions (13 whquestions and 9 yes/no questions) and 6 sentences are imperative.
Table 6: Summary of modes of the sentence
Number
%
Declarative
267
90.8
Grammatical question
22
7.5
Imperative
6
1.7
294
100
Total
As most of the sentences here have declarative mode, the focus of the speech is to give
information. King takes on the subject position as a giver of information and the
addressees’ position is that of a receiver. From King’s own experience, he gives out the
information that he thinks the audience lack but they want or ought to have. Likewise, he
has the right to leave out information that is redundant or unnecessary or ambiguous to the
taking-in of listeners. This is the relational values of declarative mode as it also concerns
the part of the information receivers.
The number of questions is not many in the speech but they play an important role. In the
Systemic Functional Language (Thompson 1996, p47), the question has an interpersonal
structure. In yes/no-questions, it is primarily the polarity of the message which the speaker
wants the listener to specify (yes or no). In wh-questions, the main purpose of the speaker
is to demand that the listeners fill in a missing part of the message and the WH-element
signals which part is missing. In other words, the speaker/writer is asking something of the
addressee (it is information in this case), and the addressee is in the position of a provider
of information. Let’s look questions in the speech and interestingly, they appear in cluster.
what about Vietnam? (line 83)
Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for
Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for
revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in
obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What
then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this
One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life? (line
116-121)
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we
refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do
they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out
new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are
39
the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these
voiceless ones? (line 190-194)
Could we blame them for such thoughts? (line 203)
What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call
"VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when
they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to
bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of
our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can
they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as
if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now
we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them
with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? (line 207215)
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than
twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name?
What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of
major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in
which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part?
(line 219-223)
Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon
the power of new violence? (line 229)
Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?
Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their
cause, whatever the cost? (line 464-468)
On one hand, questions show the interaction between the audience and the speaker. They
form a less formal atmosphere when the speaker cares for the audience’s opinion. On the
other hand, this is a speech and it is impossible to get feedback from the audience. In fact,
King raises the questions without expecting the answers from the audience because he
already knows the answers and he already knows the audience has the same answers. To
put it more accurately, King imposes the answers on the audience. This is the power of the
speech maker exerted on listeners.
Questions are asked but the emphasis is put on the answers that all people share. This
makes listeners fell that both the speaker and they have the common voice, which helps
them easily take in the following information. Apart from making the listeners unable to
ignore the issue mentioned, successive questions also add a profound impression on
listeners through their rhythm. The persuasiveness is also enhanced.
40
In terms of imperative mode, all imperative sentences start with “let us”.
Let us trace its movements and pray…(line 23)
Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge
the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations (line 396)
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day (line 438)
Now let us begin. (line 462)
Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a
new world. (line 462)
“Let us” is original of the modern let’s. In general, in the case of imperative, the subject is
not specified since it can only be the addressee ‘you’. But with Let us, the understood
subject is not ‘you’ but ‘you and me’. This is no longer the case when the speaker is in the
position of asking something of the addressee (action on the latter’s part), while the
addressee is a compliant. With Let us, King implies both the audience and he are on the
same boat and all of them have the duty to act. It is not difficult to see that King assigns
part of the duty he calls for to the listeners.
Thus, in the relational values of modes, the power of the speaker is exposed clearly. This is
also one of the objectives of a CDA.
2.1.2.4. Modality
Modality is an important one for both relational values and expressive values in grammar.
From the viewpoint of a critical discourse analyzer, there are two dimensions to modality,
depending on what direction authority is oriented. They are relational modality and
expressive modality. Modality is expressed by modal auxiliary verbs as well as by various
other formal features including adverbs and tense. In King’s speech, the modality becomes
prominent through a range of modal auxiliary verbs.
In terms of relational modality, in which the authority of on participant relates to other, we
have the following modal auxiliary verbs:
Must (39 instances : line 14, 17, 18, 19, 45, 122, 179, 204, 208, 221, 248,
274,
275, 281, 298, 310, 316, 317, 320, 321, 324, 332, 333, 336,
362, 363, 369, 370, 398, 401, 408, 421, 422, 444, 457, 469)
41
Should (line 103, 164, 264, 299, 301)
Basing on the above statistics, it is easy to see the prevalence of “must” in the relation
modality dimension. “Must” signals obligation. The following are some examples
…we must move on. (line 14)
We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but
we must speak (line 17)
We must stop now. (line 274)
The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours. (line
280
Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. (line
316)
We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this
country, if necessary. (line 317)
Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his
convictions, but we must all protest. (line 332)
In these examples and in most other cases in the speech, “must” is used with the pronoun
“we”. It is still an obligation but the speaker’s authority is not very strong. King only urges
listeners to act together with him. It is King’s personal feeling that, what “we must” do is
extremely necessary. Even in the sentence “Every man of humane convictions must decide
on the protest that best suits his convictions” (line 332), the feeling of necessity is apparent.
What King is seeking here is not forcing others to do what he wants. He simply lets people
see the urgency of the issue and then seeks the approval, support and cooperation in his
succeeding actions: protest against the Vietnam War.
King’s intention in using “must” is also revealed in the use of ‘should’ in some sentences
as pieces of advice.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. (line 299)
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves
from this nightmarish conflict. (line 301)
42
Thus, when rational values of modality are in concern, we can see a cooperative attitude of
King toward the audience. There is only one case King shows his authority over others:
“We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for
democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive
action in behalf of justice.” (line 398) It is when the action is against his motive –
nonviolent actions. He does not allow that to happen.
In expressive modality, the speaker/writer’s authority is concerned with respect to the truth
or probability of a representation of reality, i.e. the modality of the speaker/writer’s
evaluation of truth. Regarding this dimension of the speech, we have:
Must (line 105, 141, 182, 216, 217, 249, 269, 271, 331)
May (line 23, 46, 171, 185, 202, 233, 234, 295, 450)
Might (line 314, 469)
Could (line 246)
Would (line 60,75, 80, 95, 114, 124, 160, 329)
And the adverb Perhaps (line 22, 65, 206, 259)
In evaluating the reality, King is almost certain of some things and he seems to see those
events as truth.
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read:
Vietnam. (line 105)
They must see Americans as strange liberators. (line 141)
They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to
destroy the precious trees. (line 181)
Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their
actions. (line 216)
Many things to him are possibly true.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to
achieve. (line 294)
The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must
choose in this crucial moment of human history. (line 468)
43
After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which
could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam
(line 246)
Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. (line 80)
Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. (line 22)
Apart from listed modals to show the probability, the modality marker “will” is also worth
being paid attention. ‘Will’ is found in 37 places in the speech. “Will” has some trait in its
meaning to show the possibility but it is different from modal auxiliary verbs. To modals,
the possibility comes from the speaker’s evaluation while the possibility of “will” arises
from the reality. The speaker considers the event of “will” comes as a matter of fact except
for being interfered.
As mentioned above, other grammatical features can have expressive values as well. In
King’s speech, the use of tense will be discussed. Most of clauses which do not carry
modals are in present tenses. This feature “supports the view of the world as transparent as if it signaled its own meaning to any observer without any need for interpretation and
representation” (Fairclough, 2001). King depicts the reality as it is. What King presents in
the speech appear to the audience as undeniable truths.
2.1.2.5. Connective values of the text
In connective values of the text, the focal discussion is cohesion which refers to formal
connections between sentences in the text. According to Fairclough, cohesion is revealed
through cohesive features. Cohesive features may be vocabulary links between sentences –
repetition of words or use of related words. They may be connectors which mark various
temporal, spatial and logical relationships between sentences. They can also involve
reference – words which refer back to an earlier sentence or, less often, forwards to a latter
one. A variety of cohesive features are found in this long speech. However, because my
aim from the beginning is to find out how ideology and power are realized grammatically,
I only choose cohesive features with ideological implications. In King’s speech,
vocabulary links and connectors are those, apart from connecting parts of the texts,
revealing the speaker’s ideological intentions.
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Repetitions
This is a long speech (more than 10 papers) and the repetition of words or phrases is
natural. Except from modal verbs discussed above, the following are some words with
highest frequency of appearance.
Vietnam (38 times)
Speak (19 times)
Vietnamese (9 times)
Revolution (11 times)
America ( 21 times)
Revolutionary (8 times)
American (19 times)
Violence 7
War (15 times)
A range of repetitions firstly make the long speech become a unified content which helps
listeners follow the ideas. Besides the undeniably connective value, repetitions also
highlight the main contents of the text and attract the audience to the focal points. From the
words listed, a summary of emphasized ideas in King’s speech may be as follows. King
talks about Vietnam, more specifically the war in Vietnam. America appears throughout
the speech parallel with the Vietnam, which implies close connection between the U.S,
Vietnam and the Vietnam War. Thus, the focus of the speech is not the war in Vietnam, it
is the involvement of America in the Vietnam war. Here, there is also a certain link
between the war, violence and revolution. The underlying assumption is that the war
causes the violence or is a form of violence and revolution appears to fight against the war
and violence.
The verb “speak” which is repeated 19 times reveals a cue of the speaker’s ideology. Speak
means to raise your voice about some issue, say out loud your inner thoughts for the first
time. The repetition of ‘speak’ shows a long time of refrainment and many things to say
relating to these topics. Certainly, the main issue King speaks is the Vietnam war and the
U.S. involvement or the involvement of the U.S. government, then those are violence and
revolutionary. Violence and war are negative words so in King’s speech it can be
understood that he speaks to fight against these, he speaks for a revolution to change these.
The anti-war ideology of King may be well expressed through a system related words
about the war. As analysed in the vocabulary part, King uses many other negative words
about the war along the length of the speech. Thus, together with the connective function,
word repetition or the use of related words also serves as a tool for conveying speaker’s
ideology.
45
Connectors
According to Fairclough (2001), logical connectors need to be focused although not all
connectors can cue ideological assumption. It is impossible for me to list all logical
connectors in King’s speech to find out if there is any underlying ideology there. As a
result, I would like to pick up some cases to prove that connectors also may well
communicate the ideology to the audience.
Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own
document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to
support France in its reconquest of her former colony. (line 144)
In the above sentences, King provides allusion to the American government. He uses the
pronoun “we” but all understand that is the action of the U.S. authorities. King shows the
paradox in the attitude and action of American government. Anybody can see that.
America is country with the motto “Independence and Freedom” well expressed in the
famous document the American Declaration of Independence from its birth. However,
even though the Vietnamese people consider America as such a sound example of
independence and freedom that they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in
their own document of freedom, the U.S. refused to recognize their independence and
freedom. Thanks to connectors, these sentences can be implicitly understood that whatever
the Vietnamese people did, the American government never recognizes or supported their
independence. On the contrary, the U.S support was always for the French who was trying
to reconquest this land, deprive the people living here their rights of freedom and
independence. The American government was obviously going against its own principle of
Independence and Freedom. They are “strange liberators” (line 141). King shows an
ironical attitude towards the U.S. government policy concerning the Vietnam War
There is another example showing King’s attitude toward the U.S. government
involvement in Vietnam.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform
would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the
United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation,
and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern
dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. (line 163)
46
But instead signals something alternative but contrary to the previous things. In the
previous sentence, it’s the hope about independence and land reform through the Geneva
Agreement. But those hopes did not come into reality, the United States came instead. An
allusive accusation is spent for the U.S. It is America who broke the Geneva Agreement by
supporting Diem. And it is America who made all hopes for a better future life become
illusions. In King’s opinion, it is America’s responsibility for causing the Vietnam War.
The last example I would like to present here shows how King establishes the credibility in
the eyes of audience thanks to the use of the causal relation to create the coherence.
Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and
brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially
for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for
them. (line 126)
The assumption is that if King did not “believe that the Father is deeply concerned
especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children,” he did not come tonight to
speak for them. King is a pastor and the fact that he believe in God is undeniable. Because
does not show the cause for his coming to the meeting any more, it shows that his coming
to the meeting is a natural duty. On other hand, King implies what he believes in is also
what God believes in, and his coming here turns into a job assigned by God. For this
reason, his voice becomes more persuasive.
2.1.3. Analysis in terms of Transitivity
(See Appendix 5, page XX)
Table 7: Summary of transitivity analysis data
Material process
216 (46.5%)
Relational process
118 (25.23%)
Mental process
60 (12.9%)
Verbal process
42 (9%)
Existential process
17 (4.04%)
Behavioral process
11 (2.33%)
Total
465 (100%)
47
To see the ideology through transitivity, I would like to look at three main types of
processes which are also those with highest frequency as they control the whole
atmosphere of the speech.
It can be seen that nearly half of the processes are Material – the process of the external
world. They are the processes of “doing”. Main objective of King is to provide information.
Using material processes, King wants to depict the reality with its own live features.
Things seem to be happening in front of their eyes. For example:
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village.
We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing
of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified
Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We
have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. (line 195 -199)
Accounting for 25.23% is the Relational process – process of being with its function as
classifying and identifying. An interesting characteristic in this process is that we learn to
generalize, to relate one fragment of experience to another: this is the same as that, this is
the kind of the other. With a relatively high percentage, the use of Relational process is of
ideological intention. King describes the reality from his own experiential world. However,
not all people connect those fragments of experience in the same way or even they
misunderstand it. The high number of Relational processes helps relate experiences into a
system. However, in this way, King intentionally imposes his understanding on the
audience, influences the audience’s understanding of the world.
The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. (line 440)
Procrastination is still the thief of time. (line 448)
We have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have
been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people (line 296)
Mental process only accounts for about 12% but its role is undeniable. It shows how
people think, feel or perceive. The reality is revealed through the personal subjective
acknowledgement and the experiential world as well as the ideology of sensers is best
shown here.
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am
nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not
really known me, my commitment or my calling. (line 32)
48
I suppose it is not surprising that (line 52)
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves
bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism
and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. (line 129)
Thus, the use of transitivity intentionally or unintentionally has become an effective tool to
show the ideology of King in the speech.
2.1.4. Analysis in terms of thematization
(See Appendix 6, page XXXII)
Table 8: Summary of Thematic Analysis
No and percentage
Topical themes
364 (75.5%)
Textual themes
96 (19.8%)
Interpersonal themes
23 (4.7%)
Total
483 (100%)
No and percentage
Marked themes
185 (38.3%)
Unmarked themes
298 (61.7%)
Total
483 (100%)
Marked topical themes
66 (18.1%)
Unmarked topical themes
298 (81.2%)
Total topical themes
364 (100%)
The Theme is the starting point of the message; it is the ground from which the clause is
taking off. In choosing the starting point for the clause, co-operative speakers select
something which will make it easier for hearer to ‘hook’ this clause onto the earlier clauses,
to see immediately how the information that will come in the remainder of the clause is
likely to fit in with what has been said. The Theme also indicates from which perspective
49
the speaker starts the message. So a part of the meaning of any clause lies in which element
is chosen as its Theme.
In this part, as textual themes are closely related to connective values discussed above, I
would like to focus on topical theme and interpersonal theme.
Looking at the table summarizing the thematic analysis, topical theme accounts for the
highest percentage. The element playing as topical theme is a pronoun, a nominal group,
an adverbial group or a prepositional phrase which belong to the experiential world. Thus,
it can be said that the first goal of King in the speech is to provide new information about
the reality. The element in the theme is the old stuff: what King presents is already known
to the listener, and he takes it as given. The part following the theme is the news. In King’s
mind, it is what the listener is being invited to attend as new, or unexpected, or important.
In other word, the way information is ordered is ideologically determined.
It is interesting that King uses “we” as theme in 15 clauses. Except for three clauses, “we”
includes both King and the audience. I have discussed the relational value of this pronoun
before, but from the perspective “theme”, it has a new trait of meaning. What is considered
new in these cases relate to us. Maybe we do not know it. Maybe we know it but we
pretend to be unaware of it. Underlying here is a nuance of slight criticism especially when
new information after “we” is mainly negative event.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
independence. (line 154)
we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close
around us. (line 24)
We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and
sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia
which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. (line 68)
and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the
international atmosphere for so long. (line 147)
Among topical themes, in 36 cases, the first personal pronoun “I” functions as unmarked
theme. The audience knows that these messages concerned with King, with what King
does, thinks or feels and this consolidates the position of the speaker. King is confident of
50
himself, of what he feels, he thinks or he does which creates the fidelity to the speech from
the audience’s viewpoint.
It also cannot be denied that topical themes relating to the Vietnam War and problems
arising from the Vietnam War takes up a large number of cases and majority of them are
unmarked. Together with other unmarked themes, they signal the maintenance or
progression of what the text is about. Maintenance is done by keeping to the same Theme
as the preceding clause, progression often by selecting a constituent from the preceding
Rheme.
About a third of topical themes are marked. Topical themes are marked when they are
adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases, thematic equatives or predicated themes. In
general, a marked theme specifies or changes the framework for the interpretation of the
following clause (clauses), and as a result, attracts the audience’s attention. We can look at
the following examples:
what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process
that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. (Line
267)
In the clause above is a thematic equative or a nominalization “what we are submitting
them to in Vietnam”. The starting-point in this thematic equative is a question which the
speaker imagines the hearer might want to ask at this stage of the text. This calls for the
audience’s attention. Particularly, the thematic equative seems to server more as a way of
staging the message: splitting it into two chunks that the hearer will find easier to process.
It is said that theme choice in general serves to orient the listener or reader; and this
thematic equative is a particular example of this. Both the functions mentioned – asking
the audience’s question and staging the information – make explicit the interactive
consideration of the audience.
In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too
late. (line 447)
Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable." (line 357)
51
The marked themes above indicate a foreground relating to time and space when the events
take place. With the prominence of spatial and temporal markers, the following
information is made clear and accurate by King and the reliability in what is stated is
enhanced.
Accounting for 4.7 %, interpersonal theme is important as it highlight the interaction
between the speaker and the audience. Although this number is not many compared to
topical and textual themes, it is more than enough for a speech. For an ideological aim,
Kings expresses his attitudes, shows his concern to the audience during the length of his
speech by using questions with finites as interpersonal elements. A sense of friendliness is
created which is necessary for a call for a kind of co-operation.
2.1.5. Analysis in terms of the macrostructure of the text
In the course of doing discourse analysis, macrostructure of the text is one that discourse
analyzers cannot ignore for it plays a fundamental role in communication and interaction.
Macrostructures of discourse are distinguished from its microstructures, that is, the local
structures of words, clauses, sentences or turns in conversation. The presupposition behind
the search for macrostructures is that, for any given well-structured discourse, there exists
an overall idea that the author of the text has in mind as he produces it. To the extent that
the text is well-formed, that controlling idea is reproduced in the mind of the receiver as he
reads or listens to the text. In other words, according to Van Dijk (Wodak, R. and Meyer,
M., 2001),
‘semantic macrostructures’(global meanings or topics) represent what a
discourse ‘is about’ globally speaking, embody most important information of a discourse,
and explain overall coherence of text and talk. They are the global meaning that language
users constitute in discourse production and comprehension.
These semantic macrostructures (global meanings or topics) are typically expressed in for
instance the headlines and lead of a news report, or the title and the abstract of a scholarly
article. In addition, the macrostructure is identified when a person gives a brief summary of
the discourse. Where a text contains several loosely related discourses, each discourse will
have its own macrostructure.
In order to understand the ideological intention of the speaker, it is essential to understand
the macrostructure. Obviously, speakers are unable to memorize and manage all meaning
details of a discourse. Thus, they have to mentally organize these meanings by global
52
meanings or topics. Similarly to the listeners: they listen to the details, then they define
what speakers orient towards and that has most impact on further discourse and action.
Understanding the microstructure, we can find out the social relevance of topics in
discourse in interaction and social structure.
To uncover the macrostructure of King’s speech, first I would look at the title. Then I
would look at the text. Van Dijk has suggested four procedures for isolating the
macrostructure of a given discourse (1977, 144-146). The first is called attributive deletion,
in which attributes and other less important parts of the text are irrecoverably deleted. The
second is called predictive deletion, in which information is deleted that is inductively
recoverable. The third is called simple generalization, in which information is grouped and
replaced by a more generic term. The fourth is called integration, in which descriptions of
processes are combined into a more general term, which entails all of the processes. To
make the job less complex, the text would be divided in major sections using both
conceptual and grammatical concerns before Van Dijk’s method is applied. After
macrostructural statements of each section are found out, an attempt is made to combine
these macrostructures into one overall macrostructure.
In King’s speech, the topic firstly is expressed the title “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to
Break Silence”. The title is used as a strategic device for the inference or assignment of
topic – as intended by the speaker or writer. The topic must at least say something about
Vietnam. And not just Vietnam. There may be some other problems because the title says
“’It’s time to break silence”. “Break the silence” means saying what they did not dare to
say before. Now it is urgent and they must speak out. This will be clarified when the text is
explored.
After examining the whole text, a list of macrostructural statements can be as follows. M
stands for microstructure in the speech “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” by
Martin Luther King.
M1
Reasons for breaking silence
M2
The importance of Vietnam.
M3
Strange liberators
M4
This madness must cease
M5
Protesting the war
M6
The people are important
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At the beginning of the speech, King mentions the reasons why King has to break the
silence. Then he talks about the importance of Vietnam.
Table 9: Reasons for breaking silence
Conscience leaves no other choice.
line 1-2
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call line 8-9
us is a most difficult one.
Although the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must line 16-17
speak.
Because of tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to line 36
state clearly
To make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
line 40
Table 10: The importance of Vietnam
There is a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in line 53-55
Vietnam and the struggle waging in America.
the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.
line 65-66
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in line 85-87
the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today -- my own government.
America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its line 95-96
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear
No one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can line 103 ignore the present war.
104
the Nobel Prize for Peace and commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ
line 111 112
the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and line 127
outcast children
It can be seen that the importance of Vietnam also equals to reasons why Vietnam becomes
the topic of the speech. All these reasons serve as a steady ground for King to go on with
other parts of the speech. On the other hand, the audience also has reasons for listening.
This is the interaction meaning of macrostructures.
54
Table 11: Strange liberators
America – strange liberators
Vietnam in the war
In
their independence is denied
1945,
America
refused line
line
Vietnam’s independence, supported 141 -
141-
the French and pay almost the full 161
161
costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.
After 1954, America supported line
Vietnamese people see destruction line
181 205
Diem, one of the most vicious 162 - and degradation in their country
modern
dictators,
and
increase 180
troop commitments
America supports violence. Their line
the
National
Liberation
Front line
firepower destroy Vietnam and kill 181 - question the U.S. political goals and 206its people
218
they deny the reality of a peace 230
settlement from which they will be
excluded.
American leaders refused to tell the
Hanoi realized they had been line
truth
betrayed again and showed mistrust 236 -
about
the
earlier
North
Vietnamese overtures for peace.
toward America.
263
In the table is a cause and effect relationship. From the macrostructure of this section,
everyone can see that America is the source of misfortunes the Vietnamese people are
undergoing. King’s ideology is clear: Americans are strange liberators and they must be
responsible for causing the Vietnam War. This idea is conveyed to the audience so that in
the next section, they can accept King’s overt statement: “The great initiative in this war is
ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.” (line 280)
Table 12: This madness must cease
This madness must cease.
line 274
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the line 291
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam.
suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to
begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this
nightmarish conflict:
line 301 303
55
Table 13: Protesting the war
we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment.
line319
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for line 324 them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of 326
conscientious objection.
there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us line 334
all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war
in Vietnam
possible consequences in case this sobering reality is ignored
line 340
if America is to get on the right side of the world revolution, it as a nation line 361
must undergo a radical revolution of values.
the necessisity and possibility of a true revolution of value
367- 403
When king calls for a protest against the war, he mentions things that must be done. It is
not only urging the government stop its involvement, counseling young men concerning
military service, it is time for “a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam”. King also
give predictions about what America will undergo in case it ignores the war or protest the
war. Lastly, the necessity and possibility of things to be done appear as a call for support
from the audience.
Table 14: The People are important
These are revolutionary times.
line 404
the sad fact: the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary line 411 spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.
412
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties line 421
must become ecumenical rather than sectional.
a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.
line 426
We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
line 446
nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation depends on our choice.
456 - 478
belief in the right choice of the People
479 - 485
In this last section, the role of the People or American people is brought into concern.
These are revolutionary times, and it is urgent now. The Americans have to choose
between nonviolent coexistence and coannihilation. At the end of this section, an excerpt
by the poet James Russell Lowell is quoted to emphasize that the Americans must make
56
choice as if it was a challenge offered by God to see if they chose the good or evil side.
There is an interesting connection between the previous macrostructure and this
macrostructure. King calls for a protest against the war then leaves the audience the right to
make choice. However, everyone implicitly understands which choice is right, which
choice is wrong, which choice they must follow and which choice they cannot follow.
Even King at the end of his speech expresses his strong belief that people will make the
right choice. This is the power of the speaker when he imposes his viewpoint and will on
the audience.
Upon the macrostructural statements, it can be supposed that the overall macrostructure (or
overall communicative aim) of the speech is to show attitude towards the Vietnam War and
the government’s involvement in the war, and persuade the Americans to protest the
Vietnam War for the benefits of their own. At this point, King’s ideology is expressed
macrostructurally.
2.2. Interpretation of the relationship between the productive and
interpretative processes
Looking back at Figure 2, we see that for both discourse participants and analysts,
interpretation is composed of interpretation of text and interpretation of context.
Interpretation of text involves interpretation of surface and utterance, meaning of utterance,
local coherence and text structure and ‘point’. Interpretation of text concerns specific
features of the text. As many parts of text interpretation have been dealt with in the
previous sections, I would like to focus on the interpretation of context. There are two
domains in the context: situational con text and intertextual context. We will examine them
in turn.
2.2.1. Interpretation of situational context
As stated by Fairclough (2001), participants arrive at interpretations of situational context
partly on the basis of external cues, partly on the basis of aspects of their MR in terms of
which they interpret these cues. External cues are features of the physical situation,
properties of participants, what has previously been said. MR is background knowledge or
background of common-sense assumptions. In MR, especially important for situational
context interpretation are representations of societal and institutional social orders which
57
allow participants to ascribe the situations they are actually in to particular discourse types.
Fairclough (2001) gives four questions which relate to four main dimensions of the
situation: what’s going on, who’s involve, what relationships are at issue, and what’s the
role of language in what’s going on. When interpreting the situational context, I also try to
uncover the ideology through the reconstruction of King’s production process.
In terms of “what’s going on”, the activity type is a speech made at a meeting. The central
topic of this activity type is the Vietnam War, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the
necessity of a protest against the war. The activity type is associated with institutionally
recognized purpose. As there are several ideas in the centre topic of the activity type the
purpose King in the course of giving speech aims is diverse. First, it is the Vietnam war
that King has to break the silence and attract American people’s attention. He wants to
show the American what the Vietnam War bring to the people in Vietnam as well as the
people in America. Together with the Vietnam War, King mentions the U.S. involvement
in Vietnam. From King’s speech, Americans can see that they are wrong from the
beginning of the war. The last but most important aim of King is to persuade people to
protest against the war in Vietnam, to speak for peace in Vietnam.
The question “Who’s involved ?” concerns with subject positions of the discourse. Subject
positions are multi-dimensional. Firstly, one dimension derives from the activity type. In
this case, it is a speech made at a meeting and the subject positions are the speaker and the
audience. Secondly, the institution ascribes social identities to the subjects who function
within it. From this dimension, we have King – a pastor and leader of the civil rights
movement – as one subject position. The speech is delivered at a meeting of Clergy and
Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. Thus, the other subject position
belongs to those at the meeting. They may be Christian or not, they may be members of the
pacifist organization “the Clergy and Laity Concerned” or not, but they may share the
same concern about Vietnam. Also in this part, we look at the speaking and listening
positions associated with the situation. This is a speech. Typically in this discourse type,
there is no interaction between the speaker and hearers during the course. As the result, the
speaker indirectly imposes his ideology on the hearers. This speech lasts 50 minutes and it
is really long. The length of the speech reveals the importance of its content and its author.
Regarding listening position, the content of the speech can be achieved through listening or
reading by many others of all social identities of America. King may have been aware of
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this fact; he may have built in his discourse a subject position for an ideal subject, and
actual viewers or listeners or readers have to negotiate with the ideal subject. King has sole
producing rights and can therefore determine what is included and excluded, how events
are represented and even the subject positions of their audience. This is the point where
King’s hidden power is revealed.
“What relationships are at issue?” is closely connected with “who’s involved?” Let’s look
back at the subject positions of the speech. As the speech is conveyed to American people
of all identities, it is hard to determine the relationships of power or social distance. So it is
impossible to know whether the audience interpret the speech or the relationship is formed
the same as what is meant by the speaker. It can be seen that audience with different
ideologies, different societal and institutional social orders (i.e. they involve in different
situational context) may carry out different interpretative procedures to get different
interpretations. Salient here may be King’s interpretation which is imposed upon others
and King appears as the more powerful participant.
“What is the role of language?” Language is being used in an instrumental way as part of a
wider institutional objective which will be discussed in more details when the speech is
looked at institutional level. However, it is easy to see that the role of language in this
speech not only determines its genre – a speech of this type is an obvious way of giving
information – but also its channel in which written language is used to give information,
convey the speaker’s ideology and to exert his power.
2.2.2. Intertextual context and presupposition
The interpretation of context also refers to intertextual context. The concept of intertextual
context requires us to view discourses and texts from a historical perspective, in contrast
with the more usual position in language studies which would regard a text as analyzable
without reference to other texts, in abstraction from its historical context.
According to Fairclough (2001), discourses and the text which occur within them have
histories, they belong to historical series, and the interpretation of intertextual context is a
matter of deciding which series a text belongs to, and therefore what can be taken as
common ground for participants, or presupposed.
59
Regarding the title of King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence”, it can
be implied that before this speech, Vietnam had been mentioned by King. In fact, it took
King years to speak out publicly against Vietnam, even though he was opposed to the war
for a long time. In 1965, he first urged a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it took two more years
for him to make his first declaration of opposing the war during the speech at Riverside
Church. Besides, the interpretation of context is expressed through presuppositions or
elements of intertextual context which are presupposed. The title can also serve as a
presupposition. From the title, King means that beyond the issue relating to Vietnam which
had already been known, there are many other issues that force him to break the silence.
During the discourse, King must have considered the audience’s intertextual experiences,
then accessed presuppositions being given or not being given so that his interpretation can
be accepted by the audience. Determining presuppositions also means finding a way to
impose the speakers’ ideology on the audience. Thus, King’s presuppositions in the speech
can be said manipulative and ideological. Because this is a long speech with multiple
presuppositions, I would like to choose those in which ideology is clearly embedded and
then deeply affects the audience and their interpretation.
I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men
and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. (line 60-63)
And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and
white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been
unable to seat them together in the same schools. (line 71 – 73)
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the
ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today -- my own government. (line 85-87)
The underlined presuppositions in the above examples are issue in American society that
King assumes to be in the intertextual context of American people. In lines 60 – 63, King
reminds the audience of the fact that in 1964 there was a poverty program – “a real
promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white” (line 57). However, as the Vietnam
War escalated, Lyndon Johnson diverted money from anti-poverty programs to the war.
Besides showing that the war is devastating the hopes of the poor at home, the war is
hurting the poor, through this presupposition, King also makes the audience recognize and
60
unable to deny hypocrisy in the government policies when he says the program is “some
idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.” (line 60)
Another issue is mentioned in lines 71-73. King pointed to the irony of race relations.
King forces the audience to acknowledge a reality that in America at that time, there was
racism. Ironically, blacks and whites could fight beside each other in another corner of the
world "for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools".
Sad real facts are also imposed on the audience’s intertextual context in lines 85-87: the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos. In 1966 and 1967, violence accompanied militant
calls for reform and riots broke out in several cities. The audience remembers that King is
an activist for civil rights through peaceful confrontation. The audience must accept that
violence really exists in American society, but this problem cannot be solved as the U.S.
government is inflicting all this violence around the world - “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today”. King criticizes the government who makes the violence in
America worse.
It is interesting that some matters given in the previous parts become presuppositions in the
following part. “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of
smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.” (line 276-277). Thus, not
only imposing elements of intertextual context on the audience, King also imposes his
ideology on the audience mind as a text within the audience’s experience. In other words,
the speaker has presuppositions as a rather effective means of manipulating audiences
through attributing to their experience things which they want them to accept. This is the
power of the speaker.
As a part of context interpretation, speech acts is also under consideration in this part.
Speech acts concern the meaning which participants in a discourse ascribe to elements of a
text on the basis of their MR and their interpretations of context. Suggested by Fairclough
(2001), in characterizing a part of the text as a speech act, one is characterizing what
producer is doing when producing it – making a statement, a promise, threatening, warning,
asking a question, giving an order, and so on. In the speech made by King, the most
common speech acts are constatives or making statements. However, in many cases, the
act King does through his utterance is directive. Those directives may be requests.
Somehow this madness must cease. (line 247)
We must stop now. (line 247)
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The initiative to stop it must be ours. (line 280)
Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. (line
316)
We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this
country, if necessary. (line 317)
We must move past indecision to action. (line 456)
We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the
developing world, a world that borders on our doors. (line 457)
The directive speech act may be a warning:
If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful
corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might
without morality, and strength without sight. (line 458)
Or they are suggestions:
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but
beautiful, struggle for a new world. (line 462)
Commissive speech acts are made at the end of the speech as well. (from line 479 to 485)
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending
cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords
of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over
America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream.
Together with informing, stating, King also give requests, suggestions, warnings and even
makes promises. It can be realized that power relation is clear in speech act analysis. King
shows his position of power in relation with the audience. All his speech acts are direct
which implies the direct exertion of power on the audience. Combining with analyses in
antecedent parts, it can be affirmed that both power and ideology are expressed in the use
of speech acts.
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2.3. Explanation of the relationship between discourse processes and
social processes
As suggested by Fairclough (2001), when aspects of MR are drawn upon as interpretative
procedures in the production and interpretation of texts, they are thereby reproduced.
Reproduction is for participants a generally unintended and unconscious side-effect of
production and interpretation. Reproduction connects the stages of interpretation and
explanation, because production is concerned with how MR are drawn upon in processing
discourse, interpretation is concerned with the social constitution and change of MR,
including their reproduction in discourse practice.
The objective of the stage of explanation is to portray a discourse as part of a social
process, as a social practice, showing how it is determined by social structures, and what
productive effects discourses can have on those structures, sustaining them or changing
them. These social determinations and effects are ‘mediated’ by MR, which in turn shape
discourse; and discourses sustain or change MR, which in turn sustain or change structures.
In accordance with the concerns of explanation given above, King’s discourse will be
looked at as an element in social processes at the institutional and societal levels to show
how it is ideologically determined by and ideologically determinative of power relations
and power struggle at these levels.
In terms of the institutional level, this discourse is in relation with a number of institutions:
political parties, political institutions, governmental institutions, organizations and
movements. The institutional processes which this discourse belongs to are the struggle
between the government on one side and the civil rights and anti-war organizations on the
other side. The discourse of King is an important factor in this struggle. In reality, this
struggle has begun since the involvement of America in Vietnam War. King has
consistently denounced the war but couldn’t really speak out against the war. However,
King decided to take a stand to voice opposition after Lyndon Johnson diverted money
from anti-poverty programs to the war. In power relationship, King on the side of the antiwar and civil rights movement, through his discourses, struggles against the government.
Hence, during the course of the speech, power struggle is shown clearly as King
manipulates his MR to criticize the government policies. At this point, discourse is
ideologically determined through power relations and power struggle. In turn, if the
63
audience basing on their relevant part of MR arrives at what the speaker says, the discourse
further contributes to institutional struggles.
King’s speech also ideologically determines power relation and power struggle. King
called it a speech to break the silence and it created uproar. It can be assumed that King's
statements caused the civil-rights movement some harm — alienating the White House,
alienating supporters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and losing the focus
of his civil-rights goals – but they emphasize King as a leader of the civil rights movement.
In protesting the Vietnam War, King became the most prominent black American to
criticize U.S. policies beyond civil rights. The audience’s ideology is also affected by the
speech. They may change their thought about the government’s policies, wonder the
involvement of America in Vietnam and ponder the true revolution in America. Ideally,
more of them may join the anti-war and civil rights movement.
At the societal level, we look the relationship between discourse and social structures. This
is not one-way relationship. As well as being determined by social structures, discourse has
effects on social structures and contributes to the achievement of social continuity or social
change. The social relationship in this discourse is between King – a movement leader, a
politician – and the American people. As we lack information from one side of participants,
it is hard to predict how the social relationship determined the discourse and whether the
discourse sustain or change that social relationship. But in terms of the speech maker,
social relationship affects him in the way that he remains formality of a movement leader
as he is supposed to do as well as creates the credibility suitable for a call. Vice versa,
King’s speech “leaves his readers with the firm impression that he is a person of
intelligience, virtue and goodwill arguing a just cause and it is in his words, sentences, and
allusions that King establishes his character." (Homer 54)
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Chapter 3:
IMPLICATIONS
In this chapter, the help of CDA in developing the ability of critical thinking is to be
considered. Moreover, the application of CDA approach in language teaching and learning
and educational research will be under discussion.
3.1. Implications for critical thinking
From the heavy amount of the speech analysis, it cannot be denied that CDA contributes to
the development of critical thinking. CDA through its methods and techniques provides an
insight into the discourse, and helps analysts uncover ideology and power hidden behind
words. When doing CDA, critical discourse analysts have to broaden their vision as well.
The discourse is seen not only as a text but also as a social practice which is socially
determined and determinative. Obviously, CDA forges an insightful and comprehensive
view which is crucial in critical thinking for critical discourse analysts.
3.2. Implications for language teaching and learning
Regarding applications of CDA approach in language teaching and learning, it is of
significant importance to define the concept ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ from CDA viewpoint
in the first place.
According to Fairclough, (Semiotic Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning,
collected by Rogers, R., 2004) learning is “a performativity of texts – both spoken and
written. Social practices such as teaching and learning are mediated by structures and
events and are networked in particular ways through orders of discourse.”
The above concepts are clarified in Fairclough’s article. Social structures are abstract
entities (such as economic structure, a social class or kinship system, or a language). A
social structure can define a set of possibilities or what is structurally possible. Events are
what actually happen. The relationship between structures and events is a complex one.
65
Events are not in any simple or direct way the effects of abstract of social structures. Their
relationship is mediated – there are intermediate organizational entities between structures
and events: social practices. Eg: practice of teaching and practice of management in
educational institutions. Thus, social practices can be thought of as ways to control the
selection of certain structural possibilities and the exclusion of others, and the retention of
these selections over time in particular areas of social life.
From Fairclough’s viewpoint, language can be regarded as among the abstract social
structures. A language defines a certain potential, certain possibilities, and excluded others
– certain ways of combining linguistic elements are possible, others are not. However,
texts as elements of social events are not simply the effects of the potentials defined by
languages. There are intermediate organizational entities of a specifically linguistic sort –
the linguistic elements of networks of social practices: orders of discourse. An order of
discourse is a network of social practices in its language aspect. The elements of orders of
discourse are not things like nouns and sentences, but discourses, genres and styles or
‘ways of interacting’, ‘ways of representing,’ and ‘ways of being’.
So, it can be inferred from the concept above that teaching is a social practice that
constructs, and in turn, is constructed by texts or social events. Basing on CDA theory in
the speech analysis, as a social practice teaching is determined by social structures and vice
versa has effects on those structures. This standpoint again affirms the important role of
teaching in the society.
As people interact with the texts of social practices, they are involved in a process of
meaning making or learning – they acquire the ideological positions associated with such
texts. In other words, learning can be seen as a network of social practices that changes
over time and varies from place to place, i.e. learning involves changes in participation and
the subsequent shifts in identity. Such changes are created by social change or social
transformation and vice versa, they also help construct social transformation. The
relationship of learning with social transformation is articulated by Fairclough (Semiotic
Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning, collected by Rogers, R., 2004): “learning
can be seen as a form of social transformation in itself, but as a necessary but not sufficient
condition of social transformation on a broader sense.”
After the position of teaching and learning in society has been set up, in the next step, to
clarify the role of CDA approach in language teaching and learning, I would like to
66
introduce an example from English teaching and look at it from CDA viewpoint. In the
reading skill, the text to be taught is “The strange story of Martin Guerre” in page 111 Life
Lines Pre-intermediate. As this is a short story and in order to make my example easy to
follow, the whole story will be presented in the following part.
The strange story of Martin Guerre
“It was 1638 and in the village of Artigat in southwest France there was a wedding. The
bride was Bertrande de Rols and the bridegroom was Martin Guerre. They didn’t love
each other. The marriage had been arranged by Martin’s father, Sangxi, in order to unite
the two richest families in the village. The marriage was not a happy one. Martin was a
tall and strong young man, but he was lazy and bad-tempered, and he treated Bertrande
very badly. Martin had half of the family’s farm. Sangxi’s brother, Pierre, had the other
half. But while Pierre worked hard on his part of the farm, Martin spent all his time with
friends in the village.
One day Sangxi caught his son in the bam. He was stealing some of Pierre’s produce.
Sangxi was furious, so the next day Martin secretly left the village. The family waited for
news, but none came. Martin Guerre had simply disappeared. Only Sangxi knew why.
Then, eight years later, Martin suddenly returned. He had changed a lot while he had been
away. In fact, he was like a new man. He was pleasant and helpful, and treated Bertrande
well. He also worked hard on the farm. Bertrande and Martin now lived happily together
and they soon had a daughter. Their happy life did not last long, however. While Martin
had been away, Sangxi had died, and because Martin had disappeared, Pierre had
inherited everything. Now that Martin had returned, Pierre would have to give him half of
the inheritance – 7,000. Pierre and Martin argued about the money for three years. Then
one day Pierre received some strange information. Someone said that he had seen Martin
Guerre in Flanders. The village shoemaker was also sure that Martin’s shoes were now
three sizes smaller than before he had left. This was Pierre’s chance. He went to court and
claimed that this new Martin was not the real Martin Guerre.
At the trial some people (including Martin’s four sisters) said that the new Martin was the
real Martin, but other people said that he wasn’t. Finally, the judge decided that he really
was Martin. But that was not the end of the story.
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Indeed that was not the end of the story. When the judge at the trial had finally decided
that this was the real Martin, a man with a wooden leg came into the court. It was the real
Martin Guerre. And then the true story came out. When Martin had left the village, he had
become a soldier in the Spanish army. He had been sent to fight in Flanders. There he had
met a man called Arnaud du Tih. The two men looked very similar. They had become
friends and Martin had told Arnaud all about his life in Artigat. Then in a battle Martin
Guerre had been wounded in the leg. Arnaud had thought that he would die, so he had
decided to take Martin’s place and get his money. But then he had fallen in love with
Bertrande and had decided to stay. Martin, however, hadn’t died and later he had heard
about the trial. And so Martin returned to his home. Bertrande got her lazy and bedtempered husband back. Pierre lost the 7,000. And as for Arnaud? He was hanged in front
of Martin Guerre’s house.”
From CDA approach, the teaching is a social practice influenced by social structures.
Language is one of those structures. Besides, there are many other social structures that can
affect the teaching but in the environment of a classroom, social class, race and gender and
culture may be prominent. With the content of a text like the story “The Strange Story of
Martin Guerre” above, the teacher must consider whether those social structures have any
influence on the interpretation of learners. From the standpoint of an education researcher,
the teacher also needs to see if there is any effect that has been exerted on him/her own
understanding and if there is, what other ways of interpretation may be in other types of
social structures.
From my own experience, this is a story that stimulates many controversies among
students. They have many interpretations towards the end of the story and then, they
reproduce the text or the discourse and give divergent assessments. Some are for the false
Martin, some say the false Martin is worth being hanged. Most girls say Bertrande is pitiful
but some boys show hesitance in showing opinions about this character. Obviously, social
structures have exerted influence on the students’ interpretation and reproduction of the
text. The difference comes first from gender, the second may come from culture or more
specifically in this case, it is the concept of a society about happiness and justice. When I
taught my students this text, I was aware of the influence of the above social structures on
my interpretation. What I mean to imply here is that with perception of different social
structures’ effects on both learners and teachers, the teacher must be cautious in presenting
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the text to avoid negative responses from the learners which may hinder the learners’
acquisition.
As mentioned, learning is the performativity of texts. The story is the text from the book
and what the teacher says when presenting this text are also considered texts. Texts
produced by the teacher need to be flexible, depending the learners’ MR. As mentioned in
Chapter 2, assuming that both learners and teachers are under the same influence of the
social structures, learners still have different interpretation towards the texts. The reason is
that learners will draw upon their own member resources (MR) or background assumptions
during the interpretative and reproductive process. Thus, texts given by the teacher must
take into account MR of the learners so that desired results can be achieved. Concerning
MR of each student in the class during the course of teaching is clearly impossible. Like
the case of King when making speech, the teacher must build an “ideal learner” in his/her
mind. This ideal learner has ideal MR which can represent MR of all students in class
including language level, knowledge, belief, social relationship and social identities. The
less heterogeneous the students are, the more accurately the ideal learner is portrayed.
Class arrangement is very important here. Besides, it can be said that assessment test at the
beginning of each language course is really necessary.
Texts produced by the teachers can be seen as an intermediate tool to the learners’
understanding. The homogeneity in a classroom environment is impossible and each
student still has his/her own interpretation of text. From CDA approach, another role of the
teacher is to interpret other understandings and assessments so that students can accept and
take them in as a part of their MR in the following interactions. This implication is of great
importance in language teaching and learning when teaching language means teaching
another culture with different and even contrast concepts. When teachers do so, they
contribute to the development of critical thinking of the learners because the learners are
provided with different perspectives to look at the texts in particular and social events in
general. In other words, the critical approach to language study is consistent with a view of
education which prioritizes the development of the learners' capacities to examine and
judge the world carefully and, if necessary, to change it.
When producing his/her own texts, the teacher must pay special attention to the power
relation – a concern of CDA approach. During the course of teaching or lecturing, it can be
easily seen that there are similarities in the positions of participants in teaching and
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learning and the positions of King and the audience. As the constructor of texts who can
control elements of texts, the teacher is the power-holder in this relation. Meanwhile
students are passive. Thus, it is natural when students are easily influenced by the teacher’s
idea and later they are most likely to interpret the texts in the way the teachers have done.
It can be implied that the power relation in teaching and learning weakens the creativity of
the learners. To improve the learners’ creativity, the teacher must be careful in exerting
his/her power on the learners.
In language teaching and learning, there are many techniques to lessen the power of the
teacher on the learners and excite creative minds. Take the above story as an example. It is
not advisable to present the story from the beginning to the end. The last part of the story
should be left out so that the learners have to make prediction for the following part. They
will have to base on the cues from the text they have, from their MR to give the next
happenings that they think to be most logical. Then they can exchange their products
among themselves. That would be interesting to see that their products are diverse. When
the learner interacts with their friends’ texts, they also get more perspectives for their MR.
In this case, teacher only plays a role as an instructor even when the ending of the author is
given out. The teacher has his/her own idea about the story ending but he/she cannot
impose it on the learners as the controlling idea and ignore other learners’ viewpoints.
As the teacher is seen as the authority by the learners, the attitude of the teacher toward the
interpretation of the learners is very important. The teacher must have flexibility in their
behavior to get the creativity of learners develop in the right way. On one hand, the teacher
must show encouraging attitude toward learners’ own opinions. On the other hand, with
his/her power, the teacher guides the learners to the most acceptable understanding. This is
also the reason why people say that teaching influence the society.
The form of question in language teaching is also important in developing creativity of
learners. Teacher should ask more open questions than those with only one answer.
Multiple choice questions should be reduced as they naturally enclose learners in a certain
scope, and gradually, the learners may loose the ability of looking at a text or social events
from a broader view, of thinking of things that does not exist in reality.
In power relation, the relationship between teachers and learners is also an interesting topic.
According to Fairclough (2001), power in discourse and behind discourse is not a
permanent and undisputed attribute of any one person or social grouping. On the contrary,
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those who hold power at a particular moment have to constantly reassert their power, and
those who do not hold power are always liable to gain power. This is true in the discourse
between teachers and learners. In the development of learners’ creativity, there may be
cases when learners do not agree with the teachers or they do not accept the power the
teacher exerts on them. If the teacher tries to show his/her power by forcing the learners to
accept his/her interpretation, the situation may come worse both to the learning and the real
relation. From my own experience, a temporary compromise is the best policy. The
problem will be in later discussion when both the teacher and learners’ MR are provided
with more information. Hence, from CDA approach, teachers can be called people who
“teach with an attitude” (Josep M. Cots, 2006).
3.3. Implications for educational research
CDA approach also needs due attention in educational research. In general, educational
research is attached to a context – a classroom, a school program. Further educational
research may take place within a social, political and cultural context. With CDA approach,
when learning is under consideration, the implication that can be drawn out here is that in
order to describe, interpret, and explain the ways of interacting (presenting messages as
texts in context), representing (enacting social relations from a particular perspective), and
being (enacting experiences or reality) that accompanies learning, educators must analyze
configuration of social practices and the shifts across time and context. When teaching is
now seen as determined by social structures, “researchers using CDA that focuses on
different aspects of the local, institutional, and societal domains of analysis can collaborate
to bring together research that highlights different aspects of CDA with similar research
questions and research sites” (Rogers, R., 2004). It can be said that in CDA approach,
teaching matters can be studied comprehensively.
In conclusion, CDA contributes to an understanding of teaching and learning generally and
language teaching and learning particularly. Analyzing discourse from a critical
perspective allows one to understand the processes of teaching and learning in more
complex ways. Indeed the close analysis of the networking of language allows the analyst
insight into aspects of teaching and learning that other theories and methods might have
missed. CDA contributes to educational research, too. Educational research often study
what views of learning are important, what counts as important knowledge, what
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methodologies are worth following, the relationship between researchers and the
researched, and how education is positioned with other disciplines, and although there have
been shifts in the nature of educational study over the past century, the preferred
methodology has remained stable. However, Lagemann (2000) pointed out that educational
questions driving diverse methodologies, including CDA, are coming from inside of
educational communities, and, therefore, hold the possibility to change the face of
educational research.
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PART C: CONCLUSION
73
1. Summary of main points
In the development part, the speech has been examined from different aspects including
vocabulary, grammatical features, transitivity, thematization and macrostructure to find the
embedded power and ideology in the discourse. Interpretation of the relationship between
the productive and interpretative processes and explanation of the relationship between
discourse processes and social processes are also under consideration. Table 20 is a brief
summary of the findings.
Table 15: Summary of analysis techniques and findings
Text analysis
Aspect in analysis
Prominent features
What is embedded
Vocabulary
Formal words
- The speaker’s awareness of the formality
Religious features
of the discourse
Classification schemes
- The speaker’s negative attitude towards
Antonym
the war.
-
The speaker’s criticism toward the
government’s policy.
Grammatical
Personal pronoun
- The speaker’s goodwill as well as
features
Voice
credibility is created.
Modes
- Clarity of agent. In some passive
Modality
sentences, goal and action are emphasized.
Connective values
- The focus of the speech is to give
information.
- The power of the speech maker is
revealed.
- The necessity and urgency of a protest
against the war.
- Close connection between America and
the Vietnam War and ironic attitude
towards the government’s policy
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Transitivity
Material process
- The reality is depicted with its own live
Relational process
features
Mental process
- Speaker’s understanding is imposed on
the
audience,
hence
influences
the
audience’s understanding of the world.
Thematization
Domination of topical - Description and giving information is
themes
High
focused. The problem of Vietnam War is
percentage
of mentioned throughout the speech.
- Speaker’s interactive considerations
marked theme
Macrostructure
Reasons for breaking - Overall communicative aim of the speech
silence
The
is to show attitude towards the Vietnam
of War and the government’s involvement in
importance
Vietnam
the war, and persuade the Americans to
Strange liberators
protest the Vietnam War for the benefits of
This
madness
must their own.
King’s
ideology
cease
-
Protesting the war
macrostructurally.
The
People
is
expressed
are
important
Interpretation
Situational context
What’s going on?
Who’s involved?
In what relation?
What’s
the
role
The topic is the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam and to persuade people to protest
against the war in Vietnam, to speak for
of peace in Vietnam.
languge?
King has sole producing rights and can
therefore determine what is included and
excluded, how events are represented and
even
the
subject
positions
of
their
audience. This is the point where King’s
hidden power is revealed.
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Language is used to give information,
convey the speaker’s ideology and to exert
the speaker’s power.
Intertextual
context
Presuppositions
and Speech act
- King has presuppositions as a rather
effective means of manipulating audiences
presuppositions
through attributing to their experience
things which they want them to accept.
- Both power and ideology are expressed in
the use of speech acts.
Explanation
Institutional level
the struggle between - The discourse of King is an important
the government on one factor in this struggle.
side and the civil rights - The speech shows power struggle as King
and
anti-war manipulates his MR to criticize the
organizations
on the government policies.
other side.
- King's statements emphasize King as a
Discourse
is leader of the civil rights movement. In
determined by and protesting the Vietnam War, King became
determinative of power the most prominent black American to
relation
and
power criticize U.S. policies beyond civil rights.
struggle.
Societal level
Relationship
discourse
structures
and
between In terms of the speech maker, social
social relationship affects him in the way that he
remains formality of a movement leader as
he is supposed to do as well as creates the
credibility suitable for a call.
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2. Concluding remarks
In this study, I have been trying to apply CDA into the analysis of a particular discourse –
the speech by Martin Luther King “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence”.
Firstly, a theoretical background of CDA – its concepts, its analysis procedures as well as
its role in social scientific research and in general in linguistics in particular has been
provided.
Then, the speech is analyzed basing on stages given in Norman Fairclough’s framework in
combination with Halliday’s theory of Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis of
King’s speech is aimed at finding out ideology embedded in the discourse, and uncovering
the relationship between language and power. In doing analysis, I try to take an objective
stand especially in issues relating to politics and ideology.
In the analysis of King’s speech from the viewpoint of CDA, power and ideology are
revealed clearly through a variety of features of text and context. As a leader of the civil
rights movement, when making the speech, King shows his negative attitude towards the
Vietnam War, criticizes the policy of his government in the war and call for a protest
against the Vietnam War for the benefits of American people. King also exposes his power
behind the discourse as he manipulates the language to influence the audience. CDA also
helps to clarify the relationship between discourse and power struggle, and once more
proves that discourse is a part of social practice, it is determined by the society and in turns
affects the social structure.
Thirdly, the study concerns the help of CDA approach in the development of critical
thinking and implications relating to the application of CDA in language teaching and
learning. Clearly, no one can deny the role of CDA in developing critical thinking. In
language teaching and learning, CDA considers teaching and learning as social practices
and researchers using CDA can carry a comprehensive study in education when they
collaborate to bring together research that highlights different aspects of CDA with similar
research questions and research sites. Besides, power relation in education is also under
consideration.
In brief, the findings in this study have served as a further support to CDA theories
theoretically and practically.
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3. Recommendation
Apart from examining the relationship between language and power, CDA also looks at
how discourse is socially determined and how it is determinative to the society. Thus, CDA
is high recommended in discourses relating social sciences. These discourses may
implicitly exert power on others, hide ideology or even signal social changes as suggested
by Fairclough (2001). More specifically, fields that further CDA may be applied to study
include:
-
Political speeches, journal articles, advertisement in which ideology is embedded.
Using CDA in educational research is advisable.
-
Series of discourses in chorological order to see the change in ideology which may
serve as cues for social changes, to demonstrate how the decisions made today are a
product of a complex chain of discourse practices that are historically situated.
78
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