A Diachronic Stylistic Analysis Of Vague Language In American Presidents' Public Speeches On Foreign Policy

Nowadays,eloquence is regarded as an important talent,and an eloquent person is also believed to be more competitive in arenas of election and job-hunting.Therefore,Public Speech has become a required course in Western universities,colleges and even high schools.Moreover, how to make a successful speech is of enduring interest for linguists and politicians.During the past decades,interest has been aroused in the use of vague language and meaning.In a broad sense,accuracy is relative whereas vagueness is universal and absolute,as vagueness prevails in all aspects of human language,and the study of vague language is of great significance.In China,much progress has also been made these years in different domains of vagueness study and its application to various styles.However,most of the researches have been done through pragmatic approach in the interrelationship between vagueness and diplomatic language in conversational aspect,few of them touch upon the diplomatic language in the domain of public speech,and even fewer has dealt with vagueness from the perspective of stylistics.In the present thesis,the author focuses on a diachronical study of the vague language in five selected American presidents' public speeches on foreign policy,targeted at the stylistic features and functions of vagueness.Therefore,linguistic description and contextual factors analysis are adopted to analyze the linguistic features and functions of vague language in the speeches.The Speech Act Theory has also been dipped into the respect of pragmatic functions. For linguistic description,style markers at lexical,syntactical and semantic(mainly about rhetorical devices) levels are analyzed and compared.The author also makes it clear that language is a meaning potential and speeches are mostly decided by how the speakers understand the field,the tenor and the mode of discourse.In short,vagueness emerges with those stylistic features.What is more,the presidents' speeches are also determined by the acts they are tending to put into effect,either in short-term or in the long run.The selected speeches share some common grounds in terms of linguistic aspect,but due to the specific dissimilarities in time, in international backgrounds,in purposes of delivering the speeches,and in personal styles,they still have their own features and they use different techniques to realize different strategies on vague language use in diplomacy,which can be reflected by linguistic features and contextual factors.