THE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH IN 'STATE OF THE UNION (original) (raw)

The present study concerns the identity construction of President George W. Bush in his annual speech and the possible ideologies that underlie the projection of the identity. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) proposed by Fairclough (2003) is applied as the general framework in this study. The annual speech-State of the Union-, delivered by the president on January 10 2007, is used as the source of data. In addition, three dimensional stages are employed to analyze the data, namely description, interpretation, and explanation. The first stage aims to investigate the linguistic features in the text (e.g. modality, evaluation, and personal pronoun); the second stage concerns the relationship between text and interaction; and the last stage attempts to place the discourse as part of a social process in order to reveal the underlying ideologies. The results show that the identity of President George W. Bush is constructed as the figure that has a high commitment to the American interest, which is possibly applied to regain the trust from the American due to his several controversial policies that have resulted in criticism. In addition, some ideologies that appear to underlie the projection of identity are democracy, nationalism, and imperialism.