A Study Of Evasive Answer In Political Interviews From The Perspective Of Cognitive Pragmatics

Evasive answers as common language phenomena in political interviews have attracted attentions of many scholars. Some scholars generally study evasive answers as one kind of communicative strategies. Others' researches focus mainly on distributional matters—on which politicians tend to sidestep questions disproportionately, and on the circumstances under which they do so. Less attention has been paid to more fundamental issues, such as what evasive answers are, how to distinguish an "evasion" from a genuine "answer", the elementary forms that resistance to a question can take, and how acts of resistance are managed through specific discursive practices. It is rare to analyze evasive answers within the framework of cognitive pragmatics. The present thesis is intended to investigate evasive answers from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It aims at explaining how cognitive context works in the mind of politicians to generate evasive answers to sidestep questions asked by interviewers under the guideline of Relevance Theory. It is also intended to analyze why politicians evade questions and what kind of strategies are used in political interviews and what roles evasive answers play in the process of political interviews. In theory, the present thesis enlarges the application of theories to the research of evasive answers; in practice, it offers enough examples to explain how to analyze evasive answers in political interviews from every aspect.The study, methodologically speaking, relies on a qualitative analysis of the data, which is mostly collected from political interviews with presidents and presidential debate on the different websites and newspapers, while most of the data are English and a few are Chinese.The present thesis begins by reviewing literature abroad and at home, including the different definitions and classifications of evasive answers, listing the characteristics of political interviews and outlining three categories of the questions in the political interviews which all are beneficial to the understanding of evasive answers. Then on the basis of previous study and my own understanding, a new definition is provided. Within the framework of cognitive pragmatics, impetus, strategies and functions of evasive answers in political interviews are analyzed mainly. Evasive answers consist of overt evasion and covert evasion. The latter is the main focus of the present thesis. Politicians avoid answering questions by extending, reducing and changing the cognitive context of the answer to the question. And finally a case study of evasive answers will give a complete analysis.