A Pragmatic Study On Person Deixis In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

In recent decades, many scholars both abroad and at home have studied person deixis involving a variety of texts (i.e. advertisements, teachers’language, etc.) from various perspectives (i.e. stylistics, pragmatics, etc). However, there has been little research on person deixis in American presidential inaugural addresses. Obviously, in American presidential inaugurals, the social status of the speaker is much higher than the public. However, in order to win support from the public, the president can’t always consider himself superior when giving speeches. The use of person deixis is one of the pragmatic strategies in the presidential inaugural addresses to win prestige but also not to lose popular support. This thesis intends to analyze the pragmatic functions of the unconventional usages of person deixis in American presidential inaugural addresses, which will not only enlarge the research area of person deixis but also prove the importance of person deixis in English public speaking discourse.This thesis intends to answer the following two questions based on the theories of politeness principle and pragmatic empathy:1. What are frequencies of personal pronouns in American presidential inaugural addresses?2. What are the pragmatic functions of each kind of unconventional usage in American presidential inaugural addresses?The findings of the thesis are:Firstly, on the one hand, from the point of every president’s inaugural, occurrences of person deixis show that the first personal pronouns are preferred most to use by the presidents, especially the plural form of the first personal pronouns ("we") ranks first. On the other hand, from the point of all the presidents’addresses as a whole, the first personal pronouns occur most frequently, followed by the third personal pronouns and then the second personal pronouns. Besides, with the calculation of the frequencies of person deixis of the corpus in every2000words, a diachronic study (from year1949to year2013) is done, which reveals a general upward trend of the use of the first person plural "we" in the inaugural addresses at different times, though there are also ups and downs in the frequency. However, frequencies of other person deixis, i.e. the first person singular, the second person "you", the third person singular and plural, keep almost steady at a basic level over time among the eleven inaugural addresses. Secondly, four types of unconventional usages appear in the American presidential inaugural addresses:one form of metonymic reference ("we" for "I"), four forms of crossing reference ("you" for "they/them","your" for "our","he" for "I" and "we" for "it"), two forms of covering reference ("we" for "I+you","she" for anyone) and one form of winding reference (the third person noun phrases for "you"). As for metonymic reference ("we" for "I") in the corpus, there are three pragmatic functions for the president to use "we" to refer to himself:to gain good impression from the officials in the new government; to increase public trust and persuasiveness in the new government and to show modesty on the part of the president himself. As for crossing reference, the president used "you" instead of "they/them" and "your" instead of "our" to arouse the audiences’emotional resonance. Besides, the president used "he" instead of "I" to make his speech more objective and persuasive. Furthermore, he used "we" instead of "it" to maximize agreement between himself and his people. As for covering reference, the president used "we" instead of "I+you" to shorten the psychological distance between himself and his audiences and to maximize agreement between himself and his people. Another form of covering reference is the president used "she" referring to anyone to maximize agreement between himself and his people. Lastly, as for winding reference, the president used the third person noun phrases like "the American people","our people","a people", etc. referring to "you" to show his intimacy and closeness with the hearer, which helps achieve a better communication between the president and his people.