A Study Of Pragmatic Empathy In Donald Trump's Weekly Radio Addresses From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Pragmatic empathy,as a language strategy,effectively promotes people's daily communication.Political speeches,as an important way of presidential election in the United States,are a significant channel for presidents to publicize policies of governing the country.Speakers always consciously use certain language strategies when giving speeches,so pragmatic empathy also appears in political speeches.Domestic and foreign scholars mainly study pragmatic empathy in cross-cultural communication,language teaching and other fields,while there are relatively few studies on pragmatic empathy in political speeches from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis studies pragmatic empathy in US President Donald Trump's weekly radio addresses based on Adaptation Theory.All of the research materials in this thesis are taken from Trump's weekly radio addresses from January 20,2017 to August 2018.40 speeches are extracted as the research corpus from the VOA English Learning Network and White House Official Website in a random way.This thesis makes an in-depth and systematic analysis of the phenomenon of pragmatic empathy in Trump's weekly radio addresses on the basis of adaptation theory,trying to solve the following problems: First of all,how is pragmatic empathy realized in Trump's weekly radio addresses? Next,why does Trump use pragmatic empathy in his addresses? Finally,what effect has Trump achieved by using this pragmatic empathy? Firstly,the quantitative analysis method is applied to count the frequency of the different realizations of pragmatic empathy.Secondly,the qualitative analysis method is adopted to analyze the motivations of using pragmatic empathy in speeches from the perspective of contextual adaptation,namely,the physical world,the social world and the mental world.Finally,the effects of pragmatic empathy in speech are summarized based on the specific context.Through the analysis of corpus,this study finds that firstly,pragmatic empathy in Trump's weekly radio addresses is mainly realized by the choice and use of personal deixis,modal verbs,hedges and moods.The first person plural,the median-valued modal verb“will”,the approximators and the declarative mood are the most frequently used.Secondly,according to Adaptation Theory,the motivations for using pragmatic empathy are to realize adaptation to communication context factors.Trump always starts from the audience's pointof view in his addresses,adapting to the public interests and emotions of the audience's mental world,adapting to the social status and social culture of the social world and adapting to the temporal and spatial factors of the physical world in which the audience lives.In the end,through the use of pragmatic empathy,Trump's addresses achieved good pragmatic effects and political goals.It has contributed to winning the support of the people,achieving self-protection and also safeguarding the interests of the country.This thesis aims to help readers better understand the connotation of political speeches on the basis of adaptation theory.At the same time,readers can have a deeper understanding of the language strategy of pragmatic empathy,which can stimulate readers to consciously use pragmatic empathy in daily communication and meet the needs of successful communication.