The Study Of Evasive Answer From An Adaptation-Based Perspective

Evasive answer, as a communicative strategy, is widely adopted in our daily life. This linguistic phenomenon has attracted the attention of many scholars home and abroad, but their studies have failed to meet expectations of effectively guiding the current communication. In the present study, the author attempts to present a thorough and systematic analysis of evasive answer from the perspective of Pragmatics, or rather, the theory of linguistic adaptation, with the aim of exploring its specific types, generation mechanism and pragmatic functions. Theoretically speaking, this thesis can not only accelerate and perfect the study of evasive answer, but also demonstrate the powerful explanation of the adaptation theory. Practically speaking, this thesis may help people accurately comprehend and appropriately utilize this strategy so as to improve their verbal communication.So far as methodology is concerned, the present study is a qualitative analysis based on the data collected from the websites and books covering a wide range of communicative contexts. The data mainly involve the question-answer process occurring in Foreign Ministry Spokespersons'Press Conferences, job interviews, business negotiations, TV interview programs and daily verbal conversations, most of which are Chinese.On the basis of previous studies, this thesis firstly puts forward a working definition of evasive answer, pointing out that it is a communicative strategy adopted by the respondent, who intends to be pragmatically cooperative, but semantically uncooperative so as to achieve various communicative needs. Then, this thesis focuses on demonstrating the specific types of evasive answer after scrutinizing the data, which are respectively topic shifting, invalid answering, imitative questioning, presupposition canceling, fuzzy answering, and direct avoiding. Next, a new and specific conceptual framework is constructed under the guidance of Verschueren's (2000) adaptation theory, within which the adaptability of evasive answer has been discussed. The result shows that the specific linguistic phenomenon is mainly adapted to the communicative context, including the social world (the social setting, the cultural background, the politeness), the mental world (the emotions, the motivations, the personalities), and the physical world (the spatial reference). Finally, a series of pragmatic functions have been dug out, which are respectively withholding information, conveying good-self image, satisfying others'face want, and avoiding the potential conflict.