Analysis Of Pragmatic Strategies In Public Speeches

On 20th January,2009, Barack Obama sworn to be the 44th American President, who is also the first African-American President. His presidency could be considered as a miracle given the American history. From a nobody Senator to an American President, his speeches play an important role on his president campaign. And his speeches arouse a phenomenon of "Say it Like Obama". This paper is intended to explore his pragmatic strategy employed in his speeches from the perspective of pragmatic principles. It is of the hope that the research results based on the deep analysis of speeches could help English learners improve their pragmatic competence.The eight speech samples are chosen from the speeches delivered by President Barack Obama, according to the four different expected audience groups, such as American Students, American Democrats, American Congressmen, and American Citizens, building a corpus. With the qualitative and quantitative research methods, this paper explores the pragmatic strategies employed in the Obama's speech. Moreover, the computer software Antconc₃.2.1 is applied into the analysis of Obama's speeches. The purpose of the study is to reveal Obama's language features which is a better way to appreciate and learn the speaking skills from the speech. The analysis is done at the micro-level from the following three categories:lexeme, sentence and discourse. To some extent, this study is a new approach to analysis and appreciation on Obama's speeches.The research questions are as follows:(1) How are the pragmatic strategies used at the level of lexeme, sentence and discourse?(2) With the employment of these pragmatic strategies, what pragmatic effects are achieved?(3) The speech samples are chosen according to the four different expected audience groups. In that way, are there any differences between pragmatic strategies employed in the speech samples under different contexts? By the detailed analysis, it is found that:Firstly, at the level of lexeme, the high frequency of person deixis WE and YOU shows that Obama prefers to use WE and YOU to increase the intimacy between himself and audience which is helpful to achieve his communicational purpose; Secondly, at the level of sentence, Obama uses rhetorical question sentence, parallel sentence and reiterative sentence (these two can be summarized as proper redundancy strategy). "I know/believe that…" sentence, and sentence with religious coloring; Thirdly, at the level of discourse, Obama's speech is in accordance with the Maxim of Quantity and Maxim of Manner of the Cooperative Principle. Fourthly, there are differences between Obama's speeches delivered to different audience groups, which are summarized as follows:the speeches delivered to the American Students show the focus of the Maxim of Quality of Cooperative Principle; however, the speeches delivered to American Congressmen and American Citizens show the focus of the Agreement Maxim of Politeness Principle. Besides the above, this paper proves that it is feasible to analyze the public speech by using Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory.There are five chapters included in this thesis.Chapter one is a general introduction to this research. Research background, significance of the research, and the structure of this paper will be present in this chapter.Chapter two is a brief overview of relevant pragmatic principles, such as Cooperative Principle. Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory which will be used in the later analysis. The definition of pragmatic strategy and the sporadic studies of pragmatic strategies and President Barack Obama's speeches will be interpreted in detail.Chapter three is about the research methodology used in the research. The research questions, the approach to collect and analyze data, and the research instrument will be explained. This chapter is a particular methodological preparation.Chapter four is the main part of the whole paper, which is about the analysis of pragmatic strategies in Obama's speeches from the level of lexeme, sentence and discourse. Such analysis will be done from the perspective of Cooperative Principle. Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory. Then the differences between pragmatic strategies under different contexts will be explored. Besides, pragmatic functions achieved by using pragmatic strategies will be summarized and discussed.Chapter five is the conclusion of this research. The major findings and implications on the development of pragmatic theory and English teaching will be proposed. Due to the limited time and the author's knowledge, the unavoidable limitations of the study will be discussed. Last, possible directions for future research will be given.