An Analysis Of Hillary Clinton’s Speeches From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As an active politician on the world political stage, Hillary Clinton and thelinguistic features of her political speeches have aroused great concern from theacademic circles. Present researches on Hillary Clinton’s speeches generally center onsociology and politics. These researches briefly focus on the positive effects oflinguistic features. Researches from linguistic perspective mainly focus on the discourseanalysis, the textual analysis and semantic analysis.Their achievements have paved the way for and cast light on further studies.However, most of the researches just give a static description. This thesis attempts tooffer a comprehensive and systematic explanation of Hillary Clinton’s linguisticchoice-making strategies and intentions under Verschueren’s adaptation theory.According to the adaptation theory proposed by Jef Verschueren, language use is aprocess of dynamic choice-making, to meet their communicative needs and attain theircommunicative goal. Language users can make adaptation to the contextual correlatesof adaptability to a certain degree of context. Adaptation theory has been well acceptedsince Understanding Pragmatics was firstly published in1990. It provides the academiccircles with a new analytical angle and a new method to explain pragmatics. Thispragmatic theory is acknowledged to be comprehensive, scientific and systemic withstrong inclusive and explanatory capacity.Based on this theory, political speech as a mode of monologue discourse isundoubtedly a process of language choice-making and dynamic adaptation. Besides,this thesis analyzes the strategies of language use from Hillary Clinton’s speechesthrough some concrete examples from various such respects. This thesis also probesinto the way that Hillary takes advantage of the adaptable strategies to realize hercommunicative ends. By doing so, her efforts to achieve successful communication andto rebuild a new climate for American social environment are unfolded to the readers.