1.6 CDA and Political Discourse Analysis
There are many approaches for the analysis of Political Discourse integrated with Critical Discourse Analysis. Wodak (1995) postulates a major influence in this study by summarizing the constitutive principles of CDA as follows:
1- Political commitment: the aim of CDA is to uncover power-abuse and inequality. CDA is being criticised for being political only because its political values are explicit.
2- Problem-oriented research: CDA studies the everyday use of language in different social environments such as organisational discourse, media discourse, etc. Each discourse is socially relevant to the situation, thus it is problem-oriented.
3- Relationship between language and the social: as mentioned earlier, there is a dialectical relation between language, i.e. discourse, and
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Therefore, entwining these two approaches together are capable of carrying out a thorough description, interpretation and explanation of the presidential debates under investigation. Moreover, Systemic Functional Grammar is a particular theory of grammar which regards Grammar as one of the sub-systems of a language, i.e. “the system of wordings of a language”. In this perspective, “grammar is a resource for creating meaning by means of wording”.
This theory presents rules of grammar in terms of functions of words in sentences such as Subject, Predicate, Object, and Adverbial. In doing so, language becomes a tool for constructing meaning to represent knowledge. Hence, human beings can interpret and represent the world for each other and for themselves (Matthiessen and Halliday, 1997. pp. 1-3). The following table (2-1) shows the three lines of meaning in the clause according to Halliday and Matthiessen