A Study Of Impoliteness Strategies In Political Discourse From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As we know, people in communication mostly try to be polite to others forkeeping a harmonious atmosphere or achieving certain communicative goals.However, sometimes people also choose to be impolite to others and it also generatescertain communicative effects the utterer expects to achieve. Thus, impoliteness, likepoliteness, is also a very important phenomenon to which is worth paying greatattention. Actually in recent years, there have been a lot of scholars starting to turntheir attention to this field, either abroad or at home. However, research onimpoliteness does not attract enough attention compared with that on politeness,especially in China where the study of impoliteness mainly involves a generalintroduction of the relevant impoliteness research made by foreign scholars. At thesame time, the study of impoliteness strategy only focuses on the use of it in our dailylife and is lacking in studies of certain discourse type. Therefore, this thesis isintended to study impoliteness strategies used in political discourse.In this thesis, there are three questions to be focused on: First, whether or not canthe impolite utterances, like the polite utterances be used as a kind of effectivepragmatic strategy in political discourse? Second, if it can, what impolitenessstrategies are usually used in the political discourse? Third, what will be themotivations or intentions for the choice of certain impoliteness strategies in thepolitical discourse?The following conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the data:As to the first question, the study indicates that the impolite utterances are oftenused as a kind of pragmatic strategy in the political discourse. The statesmen and thespokesmen often strategically choose the impolite utterances to express certainpolitical opinion and achieve certain political purposes.As to the second question, based on certain principles and after analyzing thedata we find that the impoliteness strategy used in the political discourse can besummarized as three types:(a) Aggravated impoliteness strategy (b)Mere-impoliteness strategy (c) Actual impoliteness strategy. And the three types ofimpoliteness strategy has some sub-strategies, such as the personal attack sub-strategy,the accusation strategy, warning impoliteness strategy, condemnation or criticismimpoliteness sub-strategy, protesting impoliteness sub-strategy, vague impolitenesssub-strategy, distortion impoliteness strategies, rectifying impoliteness sub-strategy,sarcasm impoliteness sub-strategy and irony impoliteness sub-strategy. The use ofthem by the statesmen and spokesmen all shows impoliteness to the interpreters inorder to achieve their certain communicative needs.As to the last question, we take the Adaptation Theory proposed by JefVerschueren as the theoretical framework to explore the motivation for thestatesmen’s and the spokesmen’s choice of impoliteness strategies and sub-strategiesand find that it is the result of the conscious adaptation to their communicativecontexts. More precisely, the use of them adapt to one or more elements ofcommunicative context, namely, the utterers’ multiple voices, the interpreters’ many roles, the utterers’ mental world, social world and physical world. This thesis hopes tomake a contribution to the existing research on impoliteness and at the same time tofacilitate a better understanding of statesmen’s and the spokesmen’s intentions ofchoosing specific strategies and to serve as guidance for the speaker to produce politeutterances and, if possible, strategically impolite utterances.