Pragmatic Analysis Of Vagueness In American Presidential Speeches

In recent years, researchers have become more and more interested in studying the use of vague language and meaning. In a broad and common sense, accuracy is relative while vagueness is universal and absolute. In our daily communication, vagueness prevails in all aspects of human language, so it is of great significance to study vague language. Many researchers home and abroad have made much progress to study the application to various styles of vague language. Few of them have been touched upon the diplomatic language in the domain of public speeches, especially, fewer has studied vagueness from the perspective of the use of the certain people—American presidents.In our daily language use, public speech is a social activity of great importance and universe. In the certain context, for the reason of achieving the effective results and their real purposes, the speakers always employ vague language to express emotions, inspire and influence the hearers. Public speech is a great symbol in western culture, and it's a good way for American presidents to convey their policies. So, almost every American president is good at the public speech. As the greatest country in the world, American presidents know how to use this special propaganda way—public speech, to establish the friendly relationship with hearers home and abroad and propagandize their political views. Using as discourse, their selected speeches have distinctive political features and are rich in the politeness words. So, this paper analyzes the vagueness from the perspective of pragmatics, which is based on the CP and PP theory by using some presidential speeches from many fields as discourse.The pragmatic vagueness is very important to the study of political strategies in American presidential speeches:First, speech is the most important tool for American presidential candidates to achieve their political goals. Second, by learning the pragmatic vagueness used in the presidential speeches, the hearers can have a better understanding of the hidden information and deep meaning of the presidents. To conclude, although the content of each presidential speech is totally different, most of the speeches tend to use similar linguistic devices. They all attempt to achieve similar functions on the hearers, so they employ the similar pragmatic strategies—that is achieving their purpose by using vague language. And because of this, the author of this paper collects and analyzes the discourses from eight American presidents.In this paper, the author focuses on a number of selected American presidential speeches as materials to study the vagueness. The author adopts qualitative research to do the research. Basing on the theories of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, the author can conclude pragmatic principles and the purposes of the speakers.