Pragmatic Strategies Concerning FTAs In Political Discourse: An Adaptation-based Approach

Politeness has proved to be a universal topic for language researchers in recent years, while impoliteness, as its opposite, receives rather scant attention. Among abundant politeness theories, the Face Theory put forward by Brown and Levinson (1978) stands out as the most influential. They define"face"as the public self-image that all rational adult members in society possess. They argue that if a demand or an intrusion needs to be made on another person's public self-image or autonomy, it is a potential face-threatening act (FTA). When posed with the problem of performing an FTA, speakers are supposed to perform it with redressive action to lessen the degree of offence to the hearer, thus achieving politeness. It means that unmitigated FTAs should always be avoided. Though deemed as behaviours of impoliteness, unmitigated FTAs frequently appear in communication. It is true of political discourse which refers to a special kind of register including political speeches, parliament debates, press conferences and so on.In political discourse, politicians do perform both mitigated and strategic unmitigated FTAs to achieve communicative goals. Despite it, little work has been done to account for such a phenomenon. Besides, the previous theories of politeness and impoliteness more or less fail to make a satisfactory explanation of FTAs. From a rather new perspective, Verschueren's Adaptation Theory (AT) integrates cognitive, social and cultural elements into investigation, so it is invested with a strong explanatory power to illuminate linguistic choice not only linguistically but also strategically. Considering it, this thesis aims to make a relatively comprehensive investigation on pragmatic strategies concerning FTAs in political discourse with the AT as the theoretical framework.In the light of the AT, this study, methodologically speaking, relies on the qualitative analysis of the data both in written and oral forms, which are mainly accessed through official governmental websites and published books with great authority. Theory-driven and data-driven, the present study has achieved some findings through answering the three research questions: (1) Is it a pragmatic strategy to perform unmitigated FTAs? (2) What are the mechanisms and motivations behind the choice of mitigation and non-mitigation strategies concerning FTAs in political discourse? (3) How are pragmatic strategies concerning FTAs realized in concrete political contexts?As to the first question, in the light of the AT, the study shows that both mitigated and unmitigated FTAs are effective pragmatic strategies as a result of dynamic adaptation to different contexts by reexamining politeness and impoliteness. Whether to adopt mitigation or non-mitigation depends on politicians'communicative goals.With regard to the second question, it is found that the mechanisms and motivations behind the choice of mitigation and non-mitigation strategies concerning FTAs in political discourse lie in the innate demand of politicians'linguistic choice-making for dynamic adaptation to various communicative contextual correlates with high consciousness. Such correlates involve the roles of language users, the mental world, the social world, and the physical world, which are always interwoven in actual interaction instead of being independent from one another.As far as the third question is concerned, a generalization on the sub-strategies has been made respectively on the mitigation strategy and the non-mitigation strategy in political discourse. In such a case, the speaker is provided with possible linguistic expressions to produce polite utterances and strategically impolite utterances. Meanwhile it also facilitates a better understanding of politicians'intentions behind the choice of a specific strategy.