Study On The Politeness Principle In American Presidential Speeches In Chinese Universities

Public speech is an important and universal social activity. In the special context, the speaker declares opinions, expresses emotions, inspires and influences the audience, in order to achieve the good purposes. For the important role of public speech in the western society and the mode that America selects its president, almost every American president is good at the public speech. Presidents know how to use this special propaganda way—public speech, to establish the friendly relationship with hearers and propagandize their political views. So, four American presidential public speeches are selected as the corpus for the present study, because the speeches chosen have distinctive political features and are rich in the politeness words. The present thesis attempts to analyze the politeness phenomenon in American presidential public speeches in Chinese universities from the perspective of pragmatics, based on the politeness theory, and assisted by the contextual knowledge.Politeness is one of conduct codes with moral or ethical significance in behavior of everyday life, including all efforts that people pays to establish and maintain the harmonious rapport. Many scholars home and abroad have done plenty of research into this phenomenon from different perspectives, for example, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Lakoff's rules of politeness; Brown and Levinson's face theory and Leech's Politeness Principle. Based upon the research of politeness done by Leech, Xu Shenghuan and Wang Jianhua, this thesis reclassifies the maxims of Leech's Politeness Principle. At the same time, politeness, as an efficient tool of communication, is greatly related to context. The contextual factors, such as the theme of communication and the relationship of participants, restrict and interpret how we use language is polite to hearers in the special situation. Employing' contextual knowledge in the thesis could make up for the negligence of contextual factors in the Politeness Principle, and improve the explaining power of the Politeness Principle.The thesis applies the knowledge of context and the Politeness Principle to explain the polite phenomenon in the American presidential public speeches in the Chinese universities. It consists of five chapters. First, a brief introduction is presented to the study of political public speech, the significance of thesis, material collection and framework of thesis. Chapter 2 is about research of politeness phenomenon home and abroad, and the theoretical frame of the thesis. Chapter 3 briefly introduces the contextual knowledge of American presidential public speeches in Chinese universities. Chapter 4 is the descriptive analysis of the selected public speeches, delivered respectively by the American presidents and vice-president. The last chapter concludes the main views and thoughts of the whole thesis. The limitations of the study and suggestions on future study are also discussed. Through the descriptive analysis of four public speeches which are delivered by American presidents in Chinese universities, the thesis proves although some matters remain unclear in detail, based on the restrictive and interpretive functions of contextual factors, the Politeness Principle provides a solid theory foundation on which the American presidents' public speeches in Chinese universities can be systematically investigated. It also confirms that the maxims of the Politeness Principle are powerful and practicable in explaining polite phenomenon of political public speech in the special context, especially in the public speech which is delivered by English-speaker, and help the speaker increase the influence and establish the harmonious relationship with the hearer. Besides, the present study on politeness could generally improve people's communicational abilities, and help people establish and maintain the harmonious relationship in the communication and create the good exterior environment for the development.