A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Martin Luther King and Obama Discourse

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," Martin Luther King, Jr. "If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress," Barrack Obama. This study attempts to provide a cognitive approach within a critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to investigate President Obama and Martin Luther King's political discourses and to trace the linguistic devices in these speeches. In so doing, the study tries to show how language, employed in their speeches, reflects the common conceptual structures and interrelationships they both share. The study is also concerned with uncovering the cognitive operations of ideological disguises and demystifying power relations in discourse within the socio-cognitive context.