Metapragmatic Awareness In The Anglo-American Political Leaders To Visit China The College Speech Embodied In The Discourse

In terms of language use, the language user always perceives, plans the linguistic forms more or less in advance, and monitors the process with consciousness or unconsciousness, which is called metapragmatic awareness (MPA). It instructs and regulates interlocutors'choices of pragmatic metalanguage, reflects speakers'pragmatic intentions, and leads to a better understanding of the speeches. Taking the British and American political leaders'speeches at Chinese Universities as data, the thesis aims at figuring out and locating the metapragmatic indicators, which are feasible to the political speeches, resorting to the qualitative analysis.First of all, the thesis introduces four interrelated conceptions——metalanguage, metapragmatics, pragmatic awareness and MPA, and expounds their relations and distinctions.Then, the thesis gives an overview of the current study of MPA and the political speeches, discovering that, in MPA researches, taking conversation as analytical text is far more than the others. And the researches that combine MPA and political speeches are less, in which the analysis of political speeches in universities is only a few.In the third chapter, the thesis discusses the three characteristics of MPA——salience, reflexivity and self-monitoring, examining that the latter two are two important ingredients of MPA. One is the reflexive comments of language on language, the other is the observation and monitoring of consciousness upon consciousness. They show different degree of salience. In this part, the thesis also presents the explicit and implicit indicators left by MPA from linguistic code, vocabulary, syntax and speech.In the fourth chapter, the thesis probes into the mechanism and the operating ways of MPA in such speeches by examples and statistics and summarizes the salience, distribution and features of these various indicators and their pragmatic functions.The research shows that: First, the linguistic code indicator is mostly showed by the code-switching in different languages, with explicit markedness and high salience of MPA, aiming at shortening the mental distance between the speaker and the audience. Second, the personal deixis system is complicated, with certain markedness and certain salience of MPA. These personal deixis mainly reflects the MPA of identity construction and politeness. Third, the discourse markers (DMs) are widely distributed in these speeches, with different markedness and salience of MPA. The explicit self-monitoring largely exists in the cohesive words and clauses. And there are less DMs indicating restatement, modification and implement, partly because the style of these speeches is relatively formal, lack of dynamics. Furthermore, the use of these DMs is subject to the formality, theme of a speech and personal speaking style to some degree. Four, pragmatic vagueness and hedges, with wide distribution and certain markedness, highlights MPA in these speeches. They are communicative strategies intending to maintain the positive faces of communicative parties and ease the possible intense atmosphere. Five, as far as syntactic and rhetoric are concerned, the adjustment of sentence structure and the employment of rhetoric are greatly seen in these speeches, which shows that MPA plans in advance. These indicators make the important information come to the foreground, create comfort to suit audition and give a hint for the development of the speeches. Six, as to the motivation of these indicators, the principle of benefit dominants the choices of matapragmatic language, except for the overview of cognition, society and culture.The tentative research probes into the mechanism of MPA in such speeches and enriches the theory of MPA for adding more example analysis, discovering that the implicit and explicit indicators are not completely classified as Verschueren generalized, while they vary according to the speeches, hoping to offer some advice for English learners to understand these speeches completely and thoroughly.