A Comparative Study Of Public Speeches By George Walker Bush And Barack Obama From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Public speech is the bridge of comm unication between people, one of the most important human communication tools and the various expr ession symbols of people' s communication. With the help of public sp eeches, people can save and transfer the achievements of human civilization. Public speeches of the presiden ts of the United S tates have had a profound influence all over the world and have become the focus of global attention, what's more, Public speeches of the presiden ts of the United S tates have also become a very important global perspective that people in the world study the United States.This thesis makes a comparative study of the public speeches between George W. Bush and Obama based on th e theories of pragmatics. The method of qualitative and quantitativ e analysis are employed. George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's public speeches are classified, compared and summarized, so it is concluded that there are common use of high-frequency words which aim to achieve th eir respective pragmatic purposes in the Bush's and Obama's public speeches through com parisons and analyses. And there are the use of som e common pragmatic theories b ecause they s hare a common cultural base. For the other pragm atic principles, they have their own preferences, but their choice of dif ferent pragmatic theories are mainly affected by social factors, backgrou nd and personal life experience etc. In this paper, the study not only explains the public sp eeches from the perspective of pragmatics and also provides readers with an other kind of understanding fr om the political, cultural and cognitive perspective, which help readers understand th e connotation and the potential political intentions and also help the speakers to write more suitable public political speeches, what's more, this study can also help teachers apply speeches to English teaching, which help students learn English public spee ches so as to im prove pragmatic effect and en hance the speeches' appeal.This thesis is divided into si x parts. Firstly it is the intr oduction: a brief introduction to the topic of this article, the research signi ficance and research innova tion; and then it is literature review, review of domestic and foreign researches about the public speeches. For the previous studies of public speeches, shortcomings were pointed ou t; next is the overview of the definition, history, characteristics and classification of public speeches. In the west, public speeches have a long history. According to different purposes, public speeches can be divided into informative, persuasive and s pecial occasion speeches. The bas ic features o f public speeches are symbolic, transient, immobility and it also has characteristics of both colloquial and written; then is the theoretical b asis, this paper introduces the developm ent of pragmatic theories and in the theo ries of a far-reaching influence: Speech Act Theory, the Theory of Conversational Implicature, the Politeness Principle, the Theory of Relevance, the Q- and R-principles, the Q-, I- and M-principles, Pragmatic Strategies;In the major part, the author se lects eight speeches of U.S. Presiden t George W. Bush and Barack Oba ma facing with dif ferent audience, there are a com parative study of wor d frequency, intertextuality and discourse of th e eight presidents' public speeches. Through the word frequency analysis of the two presidents, we found th at the common high-frequency words of the two presid ents are “we”, “our”, “us”, “country”, “America”, “the people”, and the special high-frequency word of George W. Bush is “free” while Obama's is “job(s)”; next by the comparison of the president of intertextu ality, we found that the num ber of the two presidents quoting the fa mous and non-fa mous is the sam e, at the sam e time, the tw o presidents also cited th e speeches of their opponents which are less. T hen the comparative study of the two presidents' discourses can find that a lar ge number of order and clarity of expressions are used to m ake the whole discour se clear and give prominence to the them e, which fully observe the m axim of manner of cooperative principl e; this section also studies George Walker Bush's and Barack Obam a's strategies in answering public questions in the public speeches, and there is a com parative study of the pragmatic strategies such as evasion strategy, using euphem ism and hedges, the st udy found that Geor ge W. Bush tend to use “Attacking Questions Directly” of the Overt Ev asion Strategies; while Obama mainly uses “Showing Political Views” of the Evasive S trategies; finally is the con clusion of the article, which is a review and summary to the whole thesis.