An Analysis Of American President Barack Obama’s Speeches Under The Guidance Of The Adaptation Theory

Political speeches, especially those delivered by presidents, have played a significant role inAmerican political life. They are of great research value not only in international relations but alsoin the linguistic domain. Since the first black American president Barack Obama came into officein2009, many scholars have done researches on his speeches both at home and abroad. Thoseresearches only focus on one or a few aspects of Obama’s speeches, such as interpersonalmeanings, stylistics, figure of speeches, ideology and so on. Few have done a comprehensivestudy on all the linguistic, social and cognitive factors of the speeches. The adaptation theory putforward by Verschueren takes into full consideration of these factors in the process of languageuse, serving as a comprehensive linguistic tool to analyze a communicative event in a specificcontext. Therefore, this thesis is going to analyze Obama’s speeches under the guidance of theadaptation theory.Verschueren holds that using language is actually making choices. Language users adapt tocommunicative contexts and choose appropriate linguistic structures, which is a dynamic processunder a certain degree of metapragmatic awareness. Since its introduction to China, the theory hasbeen mostly applied in translation, English teaching and discourse analysis. When applied todiscourse analysis, it has been seldom employed to analyze political discourse. This thesis servesas another experimental study to apply the adaptation theory to political speeches.Analyzing Obama’s14speeches within the framework of the adaptation theory, this thesiscomes to the following conclusions: for political ends, Obama makes a good adaptation to thecommunicative context and the linguistic structure, as well as the meaning generation process bythe interaction between the communicative context and the linguistic structure. Besides, this thesisis going to unveil several political purposes behind Obama’s language, which is guided bymetapragmatic awareness. As a tentative attempt in explaining the relationship between language,context, and cognition, this thesis provides a new perspective in analyzing political speeches.