Analysis of Pragmatic Strategies in Political Speeches 政治演讲中的语用策略 英语专业硕士论文.doc

政治演讲中的语用策略分析政治演讲中的语用策略分析 analysis of pragmatic strategies in political speeches contents chapter 1 introduction1 1.1aim and scope .1 1.1.1 political speech2 1.1.2 pragmatic strategy.3 1.2research methodology and data collection.3 chapter 2 theoretical review of major pragmatic principles .5 2.1grices theory of conversational implicature and cooperative principle.5 2.2horns q- and r- principles.7 2.3levinsons q-, i- and m-principles10 2.4sperber this study focuses on the strategies fulfilled by specific language structures and the communicative situations in realistic political speeches, and answers the question of which linguistic structures have been chosen to fulfill the strategic functions of the political speeches, from the perspective of pragmatic principles. 2 1.1.1 political speech when we think of politics, we think of it mainly in terms of struggle for power in order to convey ideas and secure interests and put them into practice. in this process, language plays an important role. in fact, all political actions are prepared, accompanied, controlled and influenced by language. political speeches in the twenty- first century are perhaps more frequently analyzed than any other body of language in modern english. and with the growing popularity and the use of major news media and the internet, the general public currently has an utterly unprecedented level of access to reports, transcripts and even videos of every word that passes through a public speakers lips. the characterization of a text as political can be based on functional and thematic criteria. political texts are a part of and/or the result of politics, they are historically and culturally determined (bochmann, 1986). they fulfill different functions due to different political activities. their topics are generally related to politics, i.e. political activities, political ideas, political relations, etc. another feature is that they are meant for a wider public. political speeches are a case in point, and they are the special focus of the series of studies on the strategies applied in political languages. looking at the speeches from the function perspective, we can probably differentiate sub-genres, for example, as leading politicians, the speakers can either speak to members of the same political group or address the whole nations. a linguistic analysis of political texts in general and of political speeches in particular, can be most successful when it relates the details of linguistic behavior to political behavior. this can be done from two perspectives: we can start from the linguistic micro-level and discuss the strategic functions the specific structures (e.g. word choice, a specific syntactic structure) serve to fulfill. or, we can start from the macro-level, i.e. the communicative situation and the function of a text and ask which linguistic structures have been chose to fulfill this function. the political situations 3 and processes can be linked to linguistic structures by way of an intermediate level that of pragmatic strategies. 1.1.2 pragmatic strategy in the pragmatic field, austin (1962) and searle (1969) are the pioneers. leech (1977), brown and levinson (1987), and verschueren (1995, 1999, 2000) are the major representatives of the later pursuers. austin and searle put forward the speech act theory, which is one of the most influential topics in the studies of pragmatics. austins work how to do things with words (1962) first brought out the concept of speech act, and searle developed it to speech act theory and gave a new categorization of speech acts. leech (1983) pointed out that it is by the use of language that the speaker can understand the meaning that has being implied but not expressed, directly or indirectly. in other words, using language, directly or indirectly, can be considered as pragmatic strategies, which laid the theoretical foundation to the speakers used of pragmatic strategies. verschueren (1995, 1999), brown after that is a brief introduction of the neo- grician theories including horns q- and r-principles and levinsons three principles, followed by relevance theory proposed by sperber and wilson. further, a short review of previous studies concerning pragmatic strategies is provided. 2.1 grices theory of conversational implicature and cooperative principle h. p. grice was the first to systematically study cases in which what a speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means. he proposed the ideas of implicature first in the william james lectures at harvard in 1967 (levinson, 2001: 100). in his thesis “logic and conversation” (1975), grice described the concept of implicature as: “in uttering a sentence s, a speaker implies that p is the case if, by having been uttered, s suggests as its conclusion p, without p having been literally said. if the conclusion rests exclusively on the conventional meaning of the words and grammatical constructions that occur in s, the conclusion is called a conventional implicature. where an implicature rests not only on the conventional meaning of the uttered expression but also on the supposition that the speaker is following or is intentionally breaking certain maxims of conversation then that implicature is called a conversational implicature.” (bussmann, 2000: 219) in addition to identifying and classifying the phenomena of implicature, grice developed a theory designed to explain and predict conversational implicatures. he also sought to describe how such implicatures are understood. grice (1975) postulated a general cooperative principle, and four maxims specifying how to be cooperative. it 6 is common knowledge, he asserted, that people generally follow these rules for efficient communication. cooperative principle: make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. table 1 maxims of cooperative principle 1.maxim of quantity:1) make your contribution as informative as required; 2) do not make your contribution more informative than required. 2.maxim of quality:1) do not say what you believe to be false; 2) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. 3.maxim of relation: 1) make your contribution relevant. 4.maxim of manner:1) avoid obscurity; 2) avoid ambiguity; 3) be brief; 4) be orderly. grice (1975) concluded “it is just a well-recognized empirical fact that people do behave in these ways; they have learned to do so in childhood and not lost the habit of doing so; and, indeed, it would involve a good deal of effort to make a radical departure from the habit. it is much easier, for example, to tell the truth than to invent lies.” however, as alluded to already, it is also true that people do violate these maxims in conversations and people do tell lies. grice was fully aware of this, and consequently he devoted the next half of the paper to discussion of the violations. in a 7 sense, the theory of conversational implicature may be seen as an attempt to explain how communication succeeds by violation of the maxims. grice noted that a participant in a talk exchange may fail to fulfill a maxim in four ways. firstly, he may quietly and unostentatiously violate a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead. secondly, he may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and the cp; he may say, indicate, or allow it to become plain that he is unwilling to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. thirdly, he may be faced by a clash: he may be unable, for example, to fulfill the first maxim of quantity (be as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim of quality (have adequate evidence for what you say). last, he may flout a maxim, that is, he may blatantly fail to fulfill it (姜, 2000: 43-44). however，grices four maxims and the associate cooperative principle have been under attack almost from the very beginning. on one hand, the critique has focused on the values attached to the maxims; for instance, there is a greater value attached to the maxim of quality than to the others (green, 1989: 89). a further question is whether the maxims have the same weight, and are used in approximately the same manner, in different situations. on the other hand, one may also question the necessity of having all of the maxims around. especially as to the maxim of relevance it self, this has been the subject of two major efforts at rethinking grice. the first is due to horn (1984), the other to sperber and wilson (1986). the two proposals are a bit alike in that they both concentrate on relevance; they are different in that horns model keeps relevance within the general frame work of griean theory, whereas sperber and wilson made the maxim of relevance the cornerstone of their own approach to “communication and cognition”, aptly described as relevance theory (rt) (mey, 2001: 82). 2.2 horns q- and r- principles larry horn has long argued for the reduction of the gricean maxims of conversation to two principles, one that turns on saving the hearers processing effort 8 (the q-principle), the other orients to reducing the speakers effort (the r-principle). these two principles were first proposed in his “toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: q-based and r-based implicature” of 1984, and further elaborated in his “pragmatic theory” of 1988 and “a natural history of negation” of 1989 (姜, 2000: 110). according to his important and influential 1984 paper, apart from the quality (truthfulness) maxim, which he considered essential and irreducible (horn, 1984:12), the gricean maxims should be reduced to two general principles. these are the q- principle and the r-principle, the first of which is oriented to the interests of the hearer and the second to the interests of the speaker. in horns view, these two competing forces are largely responsible for generating grices conversational maxims and the implicatures derived therefrom. the first quantity maxim, concerned with the speakers need to convey his message fully, is essentially george zipfs auditors economy. most of the other maxims respond to the speakers economy (mey, 2001: 85), e.g. the relation maxim. so horn proposed to reduce all the grices maxims except the maxim of quality, to two principles: the q-principle and the r-principle: table 2 horns q- and r-principles the q-principle (hearer-based) 1)make your contribution sufficient (cf. quantity1); 2)say as much as you can. the r-principle (speaker-based) 1)make you contribution necessary; 2)say no more than you must. the hearer- based q-principle collects grices first quantity maxim and the first two manner maxims. it is a sufficiency condition in the sense the information 9 conveyed is the most the speaker can provide. now horn also calls it a lower- bounding principle, indicating that the information supplied inline with this principle has satisfied the lower limit. the situation described is at least as such. the r-principle, covering grices relevance maxim and the last two manner maxims, is called by horn as the upper-bounding principle, which, in contrast, encourages the hearer to infer that more is meant, while also implying that the situation described is at least so. horn described the q-principle as “a hearer-based economy for the maximization of informational content, akin to grices (first) maxim of quantity”, and the r- principle as “a speaker-based economy for the minimization of form, akin to zipfs principle of least effort”. in other words, the q-principle is concerned with the content. the speaker who follows this principle supplies the sufficient information. the r-principle, on the other hand, is concerned with the form. the speaker who employs this principle uses the minimal form, so that the hearer is entitled to infer that the speaker means more than he says (姜, 2000: 110). horns two principles explain a variety of phenomena in the realm of politeness, negation, the lexicon and so on, in an elegant and economical manner; they stand out as a worthwhile attempt to simplify the matter of pragmatic principles, bringing them to some common denominators (mey, 2001: 86). horn (2005) assumed that, the functioning of q-based upper-bounding scalar implicature allows for a systematic treatment of both logical operators and ordinary non-proposition embedding predicates that can be ranked on a scale (熊, 2007: 7): q-scales: logical operators q-scales: “ordinary” values 10 in each case, the strongest scalar expression occurs to the left, with strength decreasing as moving to the right. normally, by using a weaker expression, we exclude the stronger ones; the use of “many” implies that “all” cannot be used. the use of a vague expression such as “some” or “many” tells the hearer that the speaker wants to be vague; and the speaker wants the hearer to correctly assume that the speaker would have used a more rigorous expression (such as “all” or ”none”) if, and only if, there was indeed a need for it (mey, 2001: 70). 2.3 levinsons q-, i- and m-principles stephen levinson first began to formulate his ideas along this line in 1981, when writing collaboratively with jay david atlas “it- clefts, informativeness and logical form: radical pragmatics”. but it was in the two articles published in 1987 “minimization and conversational inference” and “pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: a partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena”that he formally suggested the three principles (姜, 2000: 128). in essence, levinson claimed (1987), the q-, i- and m-principles are grices two maxims of quantity and a maxim of manner reinterpreted neoclassically. and the maxim of quality, as is the case in horns theory, is kept intact. when presenting the second maxim of quantity “do not make your contribution more informative than is required”, grice raised the doubt whether it was actually required, since its effects might be achieved by the maxim and relation. in sperber and wilsons approach and that of horns, it is exactly adopted what grice had anticipatedto use the principle of relevance to subsume the second maxim of quantity. now levinson (1989) believes that is mistaken. in his view, the maxims of quantity have to do with the quantity of information, while the maxim of relation is 11 “a measure of timely helpfulness with respect to interaction of topical and sequencing constraints in discourse, as in the expectation that an answer will follow a question”. it is not, at least not primarily, about information. so he renamed the second maxim of quantity the principle of informativeness, i-principle for short; and the first maxim of quantity the principle of quantity, or q-principle. specifically, q-principle: speakers maxim: do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, unless providing a stronger statement would contravene the i-principle. recipients corollary: take it that the speaker made the strongest statement consistent with what he knows. in other words, q implicatures enrich utterance meaning just by inducing the negation of a stronger possible proposition. i-principle: speakers maxim: the maxim of minimization “say as little as necessary”, i.e. produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends (being the q- principle in mind). recipients corollary: the enrichment rule amplify the informational content of the speakers utterance, by finding the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speakers m-intended point. m-principle: speakers maxim: do not use a prolix, obscure or marked expression without reason. recipients corollary: if the speaker used a prolix or marked expression m, he did not mean the same as he would have used the unmarked expression uspecifically he 12 was trying to avoid the stereotypical associations and i-implicatures of u. clearly, levinson remarked, such cross-cutting principles would make for interpretive mayhem unless there is a system governing their interaction. and the order of precedence of application he suggested is: interaction of the i-, q- and q/m-implicatures: 1)genuine q-implicatures from tight contrast sets of equally brief, equally lexicalized linguistic relations, take precedence over i-implicatures; 2)in all other cases the i-principle induces stereotypical specific interpretations, unless; 3)there are two (or more) available expressions of the same sense, one of which is unmarked and the other marked in form. in that case, the unmarked form carries the i-implicatures as usual, but the use of the marked form q/m-implicates the non-applicability of the pertinent i- implicatures. 2.4 sperber 2)it is the most relevant one compatible with communicators abilities and preferences. according to clause (1) of this definition of optimal relevance, the audience is entitled to expect the ostensive stimulus to be at least relevant enough to be worth processing. according to clause (2) of the definition of optimal relevance, the audience of an ostensive stimulus is entitled to even higher expectations than this. the 15 communicator wants to be understood. it is therefore in her interestwithin the limits of her own capabilities and preferencesto make her ostensive stimulus as easy as possible for the audience to understand, and to provide evidence not just for the cognitive effects she aims to achieve in her audience but also for further cognitive effects which, by holding his attention, will help her achieve her goal. relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure: 1) follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility; 2) stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied. relevance theory is a cognitive psychological theory. in particular, it