An Analysis Of Politeness In American Presidents' Public Speeches At Chinese Universities

As a universal and important social activity, speech has a significant meaning for the communication among people. Public speech is one of the most effective ways to communicate with many other people. Through the public speech, the speaker expresses emotions, declares opinions and ideas, inspires and influences the audience. Because of the important role of public speech in society and the mode of American president election campaign, almost each American president is good at the public speech, and they know how to use this special way of communication to propagandize their political views and establish good relationship with the audience.With the rapid development of globalization, the worldwide communication becomes more and more frequent. The communication not only includes the contact among people, groups, or companies, but also the one among countries. For example, in recent years, the state leaders of China and America frequently visit each other. During the visiting period, the American presidents often deliver speeches to establish the good relationship and propagandize their political views.As a special kind of public speech, these political speeches made by American presidents have distinctive political features and many linguistic strategies are applied in them to achieve some specific purposes. It attracts many scholars' attention that how to interpret the speech discourse from different perspectives. Political public speeches are studied from a variety of disciplines such as political science, sociology, linguistics and so on. In the field of linguistics, the previous research mainly centers on the study of interpersonal meaning, stylistics, pragmatic strategies. With the in-depth study on pragmatics, politeness is concerned and studied more frequently. Scholars make plenty of contributions to this phenomenon, however, only several researches were about politeness from the angle of political public speech. Therefore, a further study of the politeness phenomenon in the political speeches is very necessary and meaningful.Politeness is an important conduct codes with ethical or moral significance in our daily life, including all efforts that people make to establish and maintain the harmonious relationship. As a universal social phenomenon, politeness can be found in all languages and cultures. It is regarded as one of the most powerful strategies in dealing with interpersonal interaction. Although there are many ways to express politeness, language is the most effective and frequently used way. In recent years, with the intensive study on pragmatics, politeness has become a central topic and an important object of study in linguistics. Many scholars at home and aboard have done lots of research on this phenomenon from different perspectives, such as Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP), Lakoff's Rules of Politeness, Leech's Politeness Principle (PP), Brown and Levinson's (B&L) Face Theory aboard and Gu Yueguo's politeness principle based on Chinese culture and Xu Shenghuan's adjusted politeness principle at home. The two most influential theories among them are Leech's PP and B&L's Face Theory. Leech claims to rescue Grice's CP by proposing PP, because it explains and solves the problem why people sometimes intentionally break the maxims of CP. B&L put forward an important theory on politeness which is known as the face theory. This theory is based on the face notion that is raised by Erving Goffman in the late 1950s. B&L provide a comprehensive theory based on the idea that politeness is the want of "face", and propose five politeness strategies for speakers to perform a "Face-Threatening Act" (FTA). Although their theories encounter many challenges form other scholars and still have some problems to be solved, they systematically illustrate and analyze the politeness phenomenon. Therefore, PP and Face Theory are used as the theoretical foundation in this research. Because the speeches delivered by American presidents in Chinese universities have distinctive political features and are rich in the politeness words, four American presidential speeches are selected as the corpus for the present study. Through analysis of a body of speeches delivered by the American presidents in several famous Chinese universities during their formal visits to China, the present study examines the politeness phenomenon in their speeches from the perspectives of Leech's PP and B&L's Face Theory. This thesis presents a descriptive and qualitative study of politeness in the speeches made by American Presidents in Chinese universities. At the same time, this study attempts to provide some empirical evidence for the validity of politeness theories, especially of Leech's PP and B&L's Face Theory.The present study is made up of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the research background, the aim and significance of this study, and the structure of this thesis. Chapter Two is about the research of politeness phenomenon at home and aboard, such as Grice's CP, Leech's PP, B&L's Face Theory aboard and Gu Yueguo's politeness principle based on Chinese culture and Xu Shenghuan's adjusted politeness principle at home. In addition, this chapter also gives some introduction of the public speech. Chapter Three expounds the methodology, in which the corpus, theoretical foundation, methods and procedure of this research are stated. Chapter Four, which is the main body of this thesis, analyzes and discusses American presidential speeches in Chinese universities on the basis of Leech's PP and B&L's Face Theory. The last chapter is a conclusion of this research. It sums up the main viewpoints and thoughts of the whole thesis. The limitation of the study and suggestions on future research are also discussed.This thesis, through a thorough analysis of politeness in a corpus of four public speeches delivered by four American presidents in Chinese universities, proves that the politeness theories put forward respectively by Leech, B&L are useful in explaining the politeness phenomenon and the linguistic strategies used in these speeches to create and maintain the harmonious rapport with the audience. The politeness theories provide a solid theoretical foundation on which American presidents'speeches in Chinese universities can be systematically investigated. In other words, it confirms that the politeness theories are powerful and practicable in explaining politeness phenomenon of political public speech in special context, and helpful and useful for the speakers to improve communicative abilities and establish the harmonious relationship with the audience.