DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF BARRACK OBAMA

The main aim of the present study is to explore the way Obama constructs different identities and various strategies of self and other presentation through reporting discourse.This study investigates how speech presentation functions in foregrounding and backgrounding information in narratives identified in Obama's election and immigration texts and how they contribute to the social actors' representation as a tool of critical discourse analysis.It examines the textual realisation of speech representation to determine whether they are interpretable in relation to the linguistic context of the reported utterances.Thus, the study contributes to fill a gap in knowledge by conducting narrative-based discourse analysis to account for the critical aspects of reporting discourse as a strategy of identity construction.The approach adopted triangulates more than one framework to provide a comprehensive account of the data analysed.Leech and Short (2007), meant for stylistic analysis, is contextualised and proved effective to function as a critical discourse analytical tool.This framework is supported by van Leeuwen's theory of social actors' representation.The narratives are identified following Labov's (1972) and Ochs and Cap's (2001) frameworks of narrative structure and narrative contents.The study yielded important findings including the fact that discourse representation relates to stance and evaluation which relate to self and other presentation, the presentation of the reported utterance is constructed in the present not the past tense which performs the same function of historical present, Obama uses nominalisation to suppress social actors from his narratives and highlight their negative attributes, uttered quotes and thought quotes play a role in foregrounding identities within the reported and reporting clauses.