An Analysis Of Pragmatic Functions Of Vague Expressions In Obama's Weekly Radio Addresses

Vagueness is a common language phenomenon and an important communicative strategyin language use. As the linguistic carrier of political speeches, vague expressions are widelyused as a lubricant and accelerator of successful communication owing to their flexibility andindeterminacy.Considering the study of vague expressions in political speeches, lots of domestic andforeign researchers have focused on their rhetoric and translation effects; comparatively, notenough attention has been paid to their functions from the viewpoint of pragmatics, and mostof the previous studies are not dynamic enough. The Adaptation Theory, which studieslinguistic phenomenon from a general cognition, social and cultural perspective, is publiclyregarded as a comprehensive, systematic and dynamic theory for pragmatic study. Therefore,on the basis of the Adaptation Theory, this thesis attempts to make a more dynamic andsystematic analysis of the pragmatic functions of vague expressions in political speeches, fromObama's weekly radio addresses.This is both a qualitative and quantitative research. Specifically, the quantitative researchis to deal with the occurring frequency of various vague expressions (i.e. vagueness realized atthe level of lexical, sentence and discourse) by AntConc3.2.1w—the software for corpuslinguistic research, while the qualitative research method is adopted to analyze how vagueexpressions generate vagueness and what pragmatic functions have been realized in Obama'sweekly radio addresses.As to the quantitative research, it concludes that among the three levels of vagueness,lexical vagueness is used most frequently, followed by vagueness realized at the level ofsentence and discourse. In light of the qualitative research, this study shows that, in Obama'sweekly radio addresses, the orator produces vagueness through making adaptation to both theutterer and the interpreter' non-linguistic contextual correlates, which is composed of themental world (e.g. the speaker's communicative purposes and his assessment of the hearers'emotions, the interpreter's desire, etc.), social world (e.g. social convention, social settings, etc.)and physical world (e.g. temporal deixis). And those vague expressions mainly achieve threepragmatic functions, i.e. withholding information which is not supposed to be leaked,persuading and expecting the interpreter to believe and even do what the speaker stated, andprotecting the orator from responsibilities. However, there is also limitation. This analysis is done mainly from the standing point of the orator, rather than the interpreter.In a word, vague expressions play an indispensible role in political speeches and thereasonable application may get unexpected positive effects. In spite of deficiencies, this papermakes a dynamic and systematic study on vagueness in political speeches, taken Obama'sweekly radio addresses as an example. Hence, it hopes that this study can facilitate both theprofessional and the amateur's interpretation of vagueness in political speeches, and can behelpful in English language teaching and learning, as well as have certain reference value forfuture study of vagueness.