An Analysis On Pragmatic Strategies In Political Speeches From The View Of Pragmatic Principles

Through analysis of a body of speeches delivered by the American national candidates during campaigns for the presidential primary elections and a series of press conference speeches delivered by the president and prime ministers, the present study examines pragmatic strategies applied in political speeches from the perspective of pragmatic principles.This study begins with a brief introduction of the research, followed by a theoretical review of major pragmatic principles—Grice's Cooperative Principle, Horn's Q-and R-principles, Levinson's Q-, I- and M-principles, and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. After that, the pragmatic strategies used in political speeches are categorized into three levels—lexical level, sentential level, and contextual level, analyzed with different pragmatic principles, in order to identify some of the common pragmatic strategies of pre-prepared political speeches.The pragmatic principles are significant to the study of strategies in political speeches in the following aspects: First, political speech is the most important tool for political candidates and leaders to achieve their political goals, so the language of speeches needs to be delicately and tactically prepared according to certain pragmatic principles. Second, identifying pragmatic strategies used in political speeches can help hearers and the political commentators have a better understanding of the hidden information and deep meaning of the political speakers. Thirdly, the analysis by pragmatic principles on strategies in political speeches which are comparatively complicated can be used in other fields such as business negotiation and daily communication, to help the speaker and hearer have a better communication.To conclude, most of the political speeches tend to use similar linguistic devices, though the contents of the speeches are totally different. What the political speeches have in common is that they attempt to fulfil similar functions on the hearers, so similar pragmatic strategies are utilized, and it is pragmatic principles that guide the language to the pragmatic strategies.