Analysis Of Pragmatic Strategies In Political Speeches

The paper studies on the pragmatic strategies in Obama’s2011State of the Union Address from the perspective of Cooperative Principle (CP), Politeness Principle (PP), and Adaptation Theory (AT). The State of the Union Address is one of the political speech styles, which is in essence a speech act with its illocutionary force of persuading hearers to accept speakers’ political views and policies. In order to achieve this goal, politicians need to apply pragmatic strategies. If speakers can’t properly choose pragmatic strategies according to the context, they will fail to achieve the purpose of persuasion. Thus it is possible to produce bad effects concerning not only the speaker’ powerful public image, but also the interest of the party he represents. As a result, the various tasks the government wants to carry out will be affected. On the contrary, a good and appropriate speech can shorten the distance between speakers and hearers, influencing hearers’ political beliefs and values, changing people’s opinions and attitude towards the speaker’s party. Here we hope that we can use pragmatic principles and theory as a theoretical framework to explore the pragmatic strategies used in a political speech so as to provide other linguistic researchers a reference for analyzing text.There have been some studies on pragmatic strategies, but few have focused on the study of political speeches. With this in mind, this paper selects Obama’s2011State of the Union Address as the corpus to analyze what pragmatic strategies he has used and by what ways he implemented these strategies from the perspective of CP, PP and AT.After repeated reading the2011State of the Union Address, the writer coded the whole text, categorized those sentences which use the same pragmatic strategies, and did detailed analysis, finding that, firstly, president Obama carried out redundancy strategy through flouting quantity maxim of CP, metaphor strategy through flouting quality maxim, and humor strategy and vagueness strategy are applied through flouting relation maxim and manner maxim respectively. The realization of PP-related strategies is through observing Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Sympathy Maxim and Agreement Maxim. The adaptation to the language user, mental world, social world and physical world represents AT-related strategies. Secondly, the most frequently used strategy is the one adapting to language user, accounting nearly half the total. Such predominant use of strategy is closely related to the purpose of the speech, to persuade people to accept his political views and policies. If he tried the strategies that distance himself to his addressees, he would never achieve such purpose. The least used strategy is the humor strategy. The reason may be that the occasion of the Address is quite formal, and too many humors may be regarded as not serious. The rest of the strategies, redundancy strategy, strategy related to Tact Maxim and Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim and Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim, Sympathy Maxim, and strategies related to adaptation to mental world, social world, and physical world, are used in between language-user-adaptation strategy and humor strategy, with frequencies no less than1percent and no more than15percent. The appropriate use of these strategies can make the communication smoother and more convincing.Analysis of pragmatic strategies reveals the Obama’s excellent language arts in speeches, provides some implications for analyzing and appreciating other language styles, and reminds foreign language teachers to cultivate learners to use pragmatic strategies in their teaching.