The Ideological Meaning of Negation in Political Speech

From the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study analyzed the discourse functions of negation in political speech, based on which the ideological meaning of negation is discussed. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following two questions: 1) What kind of discourse functions does negation have in political speech? 2) What ideological meaning does negation imply in political speech through the discourse functions? Taking a corpus of 35 transcriptions of political speech in the official website of the White House as the data, this study resorts to the balanced application of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods together with CDA to make more comprehensive observations than those normally use basic qualitative or quantitative methods of text analysis. The study reveals that negation has the discourse functions of introducing the new topic, highlighting the focus, countering the expectation, and modifying the information. In political speeches, the functions of negation play a very important role, such as enhancing the rationality of argument, avoiding the wrong interpretation of the discourse, and blocking information in discourse. Through these discourse functions, speakers could show their stances in a more implicit way, construct their authority images, thus rationalizing their own behaviors, and more importantly, form the binary of “us-them”. Specifically, speakers could vigorously promote their “outstanding measures” and shape a positive image of themselves, and at the same time, they deliberately exaggerate the “powerless measures” of others and construct a negative image of them, so as to achieve the goal of disseminating ideology. This study suggests that negation can create new ideological meanings. It implies that critical discourse analysis can explore the relationship between language representation and ideology from the various functions of language structure, which provides a new research perspective for ideology studies.