An Adaptation-Relevance Study On Weaseling In Political Discourse

Weaseling is the language use that is equivocal or deliberately ambiguous or misleading in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright responsibility. This derives from the way weasels eat the eggs which they find in the nest of other animals. First they make a hole, then suck out the substance and leave the shell in the nest. An egg that a weasel has sucked will look intact to the casual observer, while actually being empty. Similarly, words, phrases or sentence patterns that turn out to be empty upon analysis are known as "weaselings".This function of weaseling perfectly fits in with the intentions of political discourse. Unlike the romantic literature and the rigid law discourse, political discourse is produced for its intentions, and weaselings can achieve all these intensions of political discourse as imposing influence, covering fact or evading responsibility.The present thesis tries to use Adaptation-Relevance Model to analyze the production, identification and interpretation of the weaseling in political discourse. Its objective is to help people have a more insightful and critical understanding of political discourse and to verify the explanatory power of Adaptation-Relevance Model. After consulting the literature related to weaseling, it is found that this model has been used to analyze the advertising, diplomatic language and cross-cultural communication, but not political discourse. Moreover, because researchers, especially Chinese researchers haven't pay enough attention to "weaseling", there has been no research on weaseling in political discourse using the Adaptation-Relevance Model, which is just the novelty of this thesis.Since the notion "weaseling" is not so familiar to most of the researchers, the author first makes an overall introduction to its origin, definition and linguistic means. Then the author introduces the formation and content of the theoretical framework of this thesis, i.e. Adaptation-Relevance Model, which is regarded as a better model to analyse the weaseling from both its production and interpretation. The following part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of the weaselings which are selected from Don Watson's book Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words. The production, identification and interpretation of these weaselings are analyzed and some conclusions are made. The analysis also verifies the model's explanatory power towards weaseling.