A Cognitive Pragmatic Study On Evasive Answer In Political Interviews

This thesis is intended to investigate the notion of evasive answer in the political interview from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It is intended to explain how cognitive context works in the mind of interviewers to successfully generate the evasive answer and to abstract a model of evasively answering under the guideline of the Relevance Theory, so the intended theoretical value is to refine theories to evasive answers, which could enable us to access more understanding of the conception of evasiveness. So far as application is concerned, it provides respondents with ostensive information to tackle with different questions and shows how to use those theories in real political environments to become a better spokesperson or politician. Thus, the thesis is of some applicable significance by bringing forward concrete ways to solve the answering problems in political contexts. This study, methodologically speaking, relies on a qualitative analysis of the data, which is both data-driven and theory-driven. It begins by discussing the role of questioning types in the exchange of the question and the answer, outlining three categories of the question in the political interview—Informational question;Indicative question;Elicited question. Taking the evaluation of the contributions and disadvantages of the previous studies, such as the semantic approach (Galasinski, 2000) and the functional approach (Bull & Mayer, 1993) as a starting point, thisthesis reanalyzes the definition of evasive answer in order to include all the cases in it and examine the underlying mechanism of the act of evasion in a relevance-theoretic view, finally discusses the pragmatic functions of evasion in political interviews. Throughout the whole article, there is a claim that the respondent in political interviews can reconstruct the cognitive context by adding, reducing and changing the cognitive assumptions* or take advantage of the constraint of it so as to evade a question after he or she successfully infers the questioner's intention. The intended value of this paper lies in its examination of covert evasion with regard to both questioning types and Relevance Theory, which have never been done in the previous researches.