An Adaptation-based Analysis Of Reference In English Political Discourse

Reference has been a hot topic discussed by many scholars both athome and abroad since the last century. They have made studies onreference from such different angles as philosophy, semantics, syntax,pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and so on. We have found these studiesare mainly focused on the description and explanation of its forms,classifications, stylistic distribution, its relationship with discoursecohesion and coherence. Generative mechanism of reference has notdrawn the full attention of these scholars.We try to use Verschueren's adaptation theory to analyze thereference used by the candidates in the 2000 and 2004 Americanpresidential debates with a combination of qualitative analysis andquantitative statistics. We have made statistics about the frequency ofeach referring expression the candidate used to refer to his opponent andtry to analyze the nature and mechanism of reference.Three steps are taken in this thesis. Firstly, we give a literaturereview about reference and comment on the different approaches to itsstudy. Secondly, we introduce the adaptation theory and its view ofcontext in detail. Thirdly, we analyze how reference has been used in the2000 and 2004 American presidential debates from the aspects ofcommunicative context and linguistic context. In terms ofcommunicative context, we have analyzed how reference adapts tolanguage users, the mental world of communicators, the social worldand the physical world of communication. In the mental world, thereference adapts to the intentions, motivations, and emotions, etc. of theutterer or the interpreter. In the social world, the reference is closelyassociated with the candidate's political position and political party. Thephysical world includes the make-up of the audience and the mass media reporting the debates. In the light of linguistic context, we have attachedimportance to two points, that is, cohesion between sentences or withinone sentence and linguistic convention.The significance of the subject can be generalized as three points.Firstly, some linguists have centered on presidential debates from theangle of metaphors adopted in political language, cohesive discourse orpragmatic presupposition. We attach great importance to the generativemechanism of reference in political discourse on the basis of adaptationtheory. Secondly, American presidential debates which are competitiveand influential are of guiding significance for political debates and greatresearch value. Thirdly, this thesis is focused on the reference used bythe candidate to refer to his opponent in the 2000 and 2004 Americanpresidential debates and attempts to find out some properties of thereference used in American presidential debates through statisticanalysis.We have found two points. Firstly, in order to avoid beingperceived as attackers and to set up good public images, candidates tendto use more covert references than overt ones. Therefore the referringexpressions are flexible and changeable. Secondly, the reference that thecandidates use adapts to linguistic context and communicative contextthat includes language users, the mental world of communicators, thesocial world and the physical world of communication.Through the analysis, we hold that during the dynamic process ofdebating, candidates change their references continuously to adapt to allkinds of contexts. Reference by nature is a linguistic strategy used bycommunicators to realize adaptation and communicative goals. As alinguistic choice, reference is the result of adaptation to context. Wehave found that adaptation theory has a better and stronger explanatorycapacity.