A Pragmatic Analysis Of Vague Expressions In Obama’s Weekly Address

This thesis is a tentative study of vague expressions in Obama’s weekly address.Vagueness is prevalent in natural language and people’s daily communication, andpoliticians often employ the vague language to achieve their specific communicativegoals, gain support, show threaten, etc. The present US president Barack Obama isknown for his eloquence, and his successful speeches can be owed to his highproficiency in employing the vague language to a large extent. The present study triesto explore the strategies and functions of the vague expressions in his weekly address,so as to provide a fresh perspective for the further study.The author collects the data from the websites of www.whitehouse.gov.com andwww.putclub.com.cn for the present research.30weekly addresses are randomlyselected from the one-year data from8/30,2010to8/30,2011. It is necessary tomention that all the data are original without being changed or modified. Based onVerschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the present study tries to explore the strategies ofvague expressions employed by Obama in his weekly address which are used to adaptto the mental world, the social world and the physical world of listeners. In thisprocess, both quantitative and qualitative methods are used for the convenience of theanalysis. And then, the study discusses the functions of the vague expressionsemployed by Obama in his weekly address.The study finds out that Obama employs many strategies of vague expressions toadapt to the mental world, the social world and the physical world of listeners. Hemainly achieves his communicative purpose by the following strategies: the use of alarge amount of modal verbs, vague expressions to form parallel structure, theeffective use of abstract vague words, high proportion of “small vague words”, fulluse of temporal deixis and frequent use of vague quantifiers. The strategies of allthese are based on the premise that he can persuade the common people, build hisgood image, and serve for his government and so on. The functions of his vagueexpressions help him achieve the goal of flexibility, politeness, self-protection andcreate a vision for bright future. As vagueness serves as an important tool for the president to achieve the communicative goal in his weekly address, it is quitenecessary to do the present study in order to help the readers get a general idea of thevague expressions in his weekly address. It is also hoped that the present study canbenefit a little for the further study in related areas.