The Study Of Speech Acts In American Presidential Debate Based On Principle Of Goal Direction

The goal is the reason of speech generation. Gu Yueguo and Qian Guanlian are pioneers who adopt goals to analyze speech acts and hold that goals are meaningful. However, the systematic principle is not formed. In 2003, after studying a large number of speech acts in court trails, Liao Meizhen put forward the Principle of Goal Direction. In 2005, with theoretical basis, Liao Meizhen regarded the Principle of Goal Direction as a new way for pragmatic researches. At the same time, the model of goal analysis was formed. With the development of the Principle of Goal Direction, the principle is applied in the analysis of court trials, interviews, recruitments and drama texts, but the research object is restricted to speech acts in the relatively peaceful and harmonious situations. Few scholars have studied speech acts in emergency and conflicting situations on the basis of the Principle of Goal Direction. In the author's opinion, debaters consciously organize their speech acts to state their views in order to achieve their goals. Therefore, the thesis will explore debaters' speech acts in light of the Principle of Goal Direction. With a long history, American presidential debates are familiar to the public. 2012 American presidential debate is selected as the research object for this thesis and analyzed by the model of goal analysis, which has inspirations to debaters and audience.The Principle of Goal Direction is the framework of this thesis. The author analyzes speech acts in 2012 American presidential debate from the perspectives of hierarchy, strategy and coherence. In the hierarchy analysis, the thesis explores speech acts by Top-Down and Bottom-Up pattern and presents the hierarchy in debaters' speech acts. In the strategy analysis, the thesis explores speech strategies which debaters adopt to achieve their goals such as telling a story, rhetorical questions and irony. In the coherence analysis, the thesis explores the correlative degree of goals from the macroscopic level and the microcosmic level. Through the analysis, this thesis concludes that goals are presented by speech acts and speech acts are hierarchical, tactical and coherent in achieving goals.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction. It mainly introduces the background, motivation, significance, data collection and organization of the study. Chapter 2 is the literature review. It mainly reviews related studies of the Principle of Goal Direction, previous studies of the Speech Act Theory and previous studies of presidential debates. Chapter 3 is the framework. It mainly describes the theoretical basis of the Principle of Goal Direction, pragmatic tasks based on the Principle of Goal Direction and the goal analysis model. Chapter 4 is the body of the thesis. It mainly analyzes speech acts in the presidential debate from the hierarchy, strategy and coherence. Chapter 5 is a conclusion. It mainly presents major findings, limitations and suggestions for future studies.