Abstract

As a dominant ideology throughout America, the American Dream rests on the idea that with hard work and personal determination anyone, regardless of background, has equal opportunity to achieve his or her aspirations. Given the importance of the American Dream to American national identity, and the enormity of it in shaping dominant ideologies, this study explores this deeply-held belief and particular mind-set in media discourses related to the American Dream. Modeled on the approach of corpus-driven discourse analysis, and combining the framework of a sociocultual linguistic approach to identity and interaction, the article reports on a corpus-driven sociocultural discourse study which aims to discover, through the analysis of frequent lexical and semantic patterns, discursive characteristics of media discourses related to the American dream, and whether there are any changes of the American dream to American national identity and ideologies which might be developed in time and space.

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