A Study Of Adaptability Of Fuzzy Rhetoric In Obama’s Weekly Address

Language is not the more accurate the better. Sometimes the appropriate use of fuzzy rhetoric can better adapt to the mental, social and physical worlds of speakers and listeners, and then achieve specific communicative intentions and purposes. Selecting Obama’s weekly address as corpus, the thesis aims to prove the rationality and feasibility of the above view, and highlight the status and role of fuzzy rhetoric in speech communication. In this thesis, the author will mainly answer three questions: What kind of forming devices of fuzzy rhetoric is frequently used in Obama’s weekly address? Is it valuable to study the fuzzy rhetoric in the weekly address? How does Obama achieve contextual correlates of adaptability by using three main forming devices of fuzzy rhetoric in language use?In order to solve the problems, the author collects 50 speeches from the official website of American government, www.whitehouse.gov, spanning from March 15, 2014 to March 28, 2015, and sets up a mini-corpus. To ensure the accuracy of data, the author proofreads the corpus with the help of domestic famous English learning websites, www.putclub.com and www.bigear.cn. In the thesis, the author adopts the method of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Through quantitative analysis, the author finds that fuzzy rhetoric is widespread in Obama’s weekly address. Among fuzzy rhetoric, fuzzy words occupy the largest proportion, hedges are the second and traditional figures of speech are in the third place. More specifically, pronouns account for the largest proportion in fuzzy rhetoric. Through qualitative analysis, under the guidance of Jef Verschuren’s Adaptation Theory, the author does a systematic research on the dynamic adaptation process of communicative contexts realized by Obama’s usage of fuzzy rhetoric, which is the focus of the thesis. This part regards the three commonly-used forming devices of fuzzy rhetoric as the main line, and studies how Obama uses fuzzy words such as temporal words, numerals, pronouns, and adjectives, hedges such as adaptors and rounders, figures of speech like metaphor, metonymy, euphemism, understatement, hyperbole and personification to realize the dynamic contextual adaptation. In addition, this thesis also studies the particular and specific pragmatic functions of fuzzy rhetoric exerted in the process of adaptation. The functions are to make utterance hard to be negated, show politeness, avoid conflicts and maintain a harmonious interpersonal relationship, withhold information purposely and win public supports.The study of adaptability of fuzzy rhetoric in Obama’s weekly address can help us better understand the role of fuzzy rhetoric in this kind of political discourse, enhance professional and amateur English lovers to understand fuzzy rhetoric in political speeches deeply, improve people’s interest in English study, and finally improve each person’s individual qualities. At the same time, the study also has certain enlightenment functions on verbal communication and language teaching. In recent years most theses analyze fuzzy phenomena or mainly study the pragmatic functions of fuzzy language in the perspective of Adaptation Theory, however, theses that combine Adaptation Theory with fuzzy rhetoric directly are few. Therefore, taking this situation as the starting point, the thesis tries to do a specialized, systematic and dynamic research on fuzzy rhetoric, so as to provide a new angle for future research in related fields and provide references for future study of fuzziness.