A Study Of The Pragmatic Strategies In U.S. Presidential Debates From Socio-cognitive Approach To Pragmatics

Pragmatic strategies refer to the measures or approaches that are adopted by language users to achieve certain communicative purposes in the way of producing specific language meanings through the choice of language structure.Although pragmatic strategies have been investigated in such cases as free debates,talk show and political interview,they've never been investigated from the perspective of socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics(SCA).The present study primarily aims to answer the following three questions:1.What pragmatic strategies are used in the U.S.presidential debates?2.What are the features of these pragmatic strategies from the perspective of socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics?3.What are the reasons for the selection of pragmatic strategies in the U.S.presidential debates from the perspective of socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics?According to qualitative research methodology,the author has collated and tagged the Three Debates between Trump and Hillary Corpus(TDTHC),based on which the quantity and frequency of the pragmatic strategies used by Trump and Hillary in U.S.presidential debates in 2016 are counted and analyzed through a discourse analytical approach.And the major research findings of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,the total amount of the pragmatic strategies used by Trump in these three debates exceeds that of Hillary with repeated use of certain pragmatic strategies,among which repetition,information-reinforcement and encroachment are the most used ones.However,Hillary used more parallelism than Trump did.And both of them used various rhetorical devices in the three presidential debates.Secondly,the pragmatic strategies used in the three U.S.presidential debates have eight socio-cognitive pragmatic features as follows: exclusiveness,variability,adaptability,figurability,diversity,duality,salience and relevance.Last but not least,there exist two reasons for Trump and Hillary to select pragmatic strategies in the debates from socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics.One is obedience to the needs of the other party,and the other is violation of the needs of the other party.However,these two reasons can be concluded into the single one: obedience to their own needs.