A Study Of Adaptability Of Speech Discourse From Contextual Perspective

In the worldwide intercultural communication, leaders from different countries tend to deliver speeches during the formal visits, especially for China and American leaders. It attracts many scholars'attention that how to interpret the speech discourse from contextual perspective. Based on Verschueren's Contextual Adaptation Theory, this thesis does detail analysis on adaptability of three American presidential speeches.There are altogether six chapters in this paper.Chapter one is introduction about the research background and starting point, the analysis perspective and the main structure of the thesis.Chapter two sheds light on related theories on context, such as Malinowski, Firth, Halliday and Verschueren. Considering the features of each theory it is concluded that Verschueren's Contextual Adaptation Theory better suits the current research. Notions of discourse and discourse analysis are also generated as literature review.Chapter three is Methodology in which the purpose of this research, data collection and research method are stated.Chapter four is the main body of this thesis– analysis and discussion. Language corpus is analyzed under contextual factors from choice of first personal pronoun, tense, voice from parallelism.Chapter five is results and implications from the data analysis. Speaker's language using is in adaptation to communicative context (social world, mental world and physical world) and linguistic context. Moreover, it is a continuous dynamic process. Implications of this study are twofold: theoretical and practical.Chapter six is the conclusion of this research. Due to the limited data, if given more speeches as the analytical materials, the results would be more representative and could reveal more characteristics of this particular type of speech. It is hoped that more types of text can be examined within the framework Contextual Adaptation.