Pragmatic Analysis Of Presidential Debates-from The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Presidential debate is an important political activity in American social life, which has become the indispensable part of world political affairs. Candidates in presidential debates have the goal of persuading audience voting for the candidates. In order to realize their goals, candidates employ linguistic and non-linguistic pragmatic strategies to maximize the optimal relevance of their communicative intention. The rhetoric devices and functions of political debates were paid much attention by previous researchers. This thesis regards political debate as a typical ostension-inferential process; thus, Relevance Theory, as a pragmatic-cognitive approach to study the presidential debates, is adopted.The Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson considers communication as an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. According to it, the communicators involved in the communication cooperate successfully as both of them get relevance. On one hand, the addressor sets in his utterance ostensive stimuli to express his information intention and communication intention; on the other hand, the listener, by the speaker's ostensive information, chooses the explanation of the optimal relevance from various semantic expressions. Comprehension of cognitive context, the optimal relevance, and communicative intention is conducive to the understanding of pragmatic strategies in presidential debates.This thesis studies the past 14 American televised presidential debates from 1992 to 2004; Through the collection and analysis of the past 14 debates, it is realized that presupposition and metaphor are adopted in all candidates'words to make their language more economic, concealable, and thus persuasive. According to RT, candidates'adopt strategies of presupposition and metaphor in American presidential debates as the means to realize the ostensive communication; while audiences make inference by their ostension with the cognitive context to get acquainted of their communicative intention, following a path of least effort so as to make the relevant in the expected way. The thesis tries to explain how candidates choose ostensive strategies to express their communicative intention, and how the audiences realize the optimal ?relevance during their inferential process.Then, this thesis continues to discuss the cognitive process of presupposition and metaphor understanding in American Presidential debates. The process follows Sperber and Wilson's ostensive-inferential model, which includes three sub-tasks: the identification of explicatures, the construction of contextual assumptions and the recovery of implicatures. In the first sub-task, the utterance is interpreted to semantic representations decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and other pragmatic enrichment process. In the second sub-task, the hearer follows a path of least effort to gain enough cognitive contexts. The third task is based on non-demonstrative inference, which is an inference from one assumption to another.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction to US presidential debates. Chapter two is literature review, introducing the previous researches of political debates. Chapter three is an introduction to the Relevance Theory. Chapter four goes further into the crucial pragmatic strategies in presidential debates. Chapter five is a conclusion. It points out the possible contribution and the limitation of this thesis.The combination of RT with political debates must create a new perspective for both domains.