On The Pragmatic Strategies Adopted In International Varsity Debate

The International Varsity Debate (shortened form "National Debate") is an international Chinese speech event Jointly hosted by Media Corp Group and CCTV. It has received widespread concern since first held in1993. As a kind of special organized regular verbal communication activity, the National Debate has been paid close attention by many scholars from different fields, and of course, it has attracted linguists’attention. This thesis first reviews the existing researches of the National Debate and pragmatic strategies, and analyzes the contents, methods and significance of this research. The research is about to explore pragmatic strategies used by debaters and discuss the motivation from the perspective of pragmatics. Through studying,various pragmatic strategies are found to be used in the process of debate. Firstly, this thesis analyzes the applying strategy of pragmatic principles, finding that debaters will consciously observe or violate the Cooperative Principle(CP) and Politeness Principle(PP).Secondly, this thesis explores the application of figures of speech, finding reference, parallelism, parody, utterance (rhetorical question), etc would be applied timely in the process of debate, and counts the distribution of each figures of speech in each part of debate at random and also discusses the reason for the difference among the distribution. Thirdly, this essay investigates the strategy of adaptation to the context, finding that debaters will adapt to internal、 accompanying and external context according to the need of the debate. Lastly, the thesis discusses the motivations to implementation of pragmatic strategies, and finds that in order to win the debate, debaters would like to chose and use different pragmatic strategies positively, that is to say, that the Goal direction is the cause and motive power to using different pragmatic strategies.