A Study Of Mitigation Strategies In Political Interview Talks Based On Adaptation

Recently, mitigation has become a common phenomenon existing in interactive communication, and plays a significant role in social comm unicative activities. Reviewing the s tudies of mitigation strategies, much of them focus on genera l interview talks, which are less discussed in the specific political field.Twenty latest American political interview talks of gov ernment heads are selected as a corpus in this thesis, and they are analyzed by the help of the software Antcouncv. This thesis is both a qualita tive and a quantita tive study analyzing mitigation strategies of interview talks in American political field in order to explore the features and adaptation rules in politic al interview talks based on V erschueren’s Adaptation Theory.This thesis adopts Caf fi’s taxonomy of mitigation strategies: bushes which include understaters and epistem ic modals; hedges which include subjetivizers, truth claimers and hesitators; shields which include evid entials and conditionals. Furthermore, it is f ound that in a ll of the mitigation strategies, evidentials(if), subjetivizers(I think), and hesitators(well) are most frequently employed in American political interview talks.Meanwhile, this thes is focuses on explor ing the con textual factors which mitigation strategies adapt to based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory. The analysis is conducted from three m ain aspects, nam ely mental factors, social factors and physical factors. The mental factors contain the speakers’ motivation, emotion and the politicians’ wish of self-protection. The social f actors involve talk show setting and cultural norms. The physical factors mainly concern temporal deixis and spatial deixis.Chapter one is an introduction to this thesis. Chapter two mainly introduces the literature review of the study. Chapter th ree introduces the research design of th e thesis, which consists of research questi ons, research m ethod and data collection. Chapter four is the data analysis. Chapter five is the conclusion part.To sum up, this thesis explores the frequently used m itigation strategies in American political field, the frequency of every kind of strategy and the contex tual factors constraining them. It is hoped that f urther research will be car ried out at a deeper level.