An Analysis Of Contextual Adaptability In Obama’s Speeches From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Political speech,as an important form of public speech,is aimed to express position and publicize opinion on national affairs and international relationships.As a typical representative of political speech,presidential speech plays a very important role in political life.Barack Obama is the first African-American president in American history.Through his political career,with his eloquent speech skills,Obama has made learning English a hot trend since his inauguration.Until today,his speech is still a good example for many public speaking enthusiasts.Meanwhile,many researchers both at home and abroad carry out studies on his political speeches from different aspects,such as stylistic rhetoric,discourse criticism,interpersonal meaning and so on.However,all of the previous researches mainly focus on a certain aspect and all of them are limited in a static description,which are not comprehensive and systematic.However,as a monologue discourse,political speech is a dynamic process of making choices which is as the same as other linguistic communication activities.Different contexts may lead to different meanings.Therefore,when involved in a speech,speakers should make full considerations contextual correlates,pay attention to his speech and behavior in accordance to social background and social settings so as to create a good public image.Moreover,in the process of choosing words,the speaker should choose the speech contents which adapts to people’s hearts and arouse their sympathy in order to achieve the communicative purposes successfully.Therefore,on the basis of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory,this thesis analyzes Obama’s speeches from contextual correlates and explores how Obama moves and persuades the audiences through adaptation to communicative context and linguistic context,thus gets their sympathy and support.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is proposed and further explained in his book Understanding Pragmatics.From his point of view,due to the three characteristics of language--variability,negotiabilty and adaptabilty,people can make continuous and appropriate choices when using language.Meanwhile,in order to accomplish their communicative goals,language users need to adapt to contextual correlates and chose appropriate language structure when they are involved in the process of communication.Therefore,it is very important to analyze contextual correlates when using language.According toVerschueren,contextual correlates consist of two aspects,they are communicative context and linguistic context.He presents that the physical,social and mental worlds that concerning language users in the process of language use is communicative context.In addition,he regards linguistic context as language means which are selected according to different context in the process of language use.On the basis of the Adaptation Theory,the author carries out the study of Obama’s political speeches from the following two aspects: communicative context and linguistic context and intended to answer the following four research questions:(1)What contextual factors do Obama adapt to in his political speeches?(2)How Obama’s speeches adapt to the audiences’ physical,social and mental worlds ?(3)What kind of textual strategies does Obama employ to adapt to the linguistic context?(4)How does the adaptation to contextual correlates actually work in Obama’s speeches?The whole thesis is consisted of five chapters.Chapter One gives an overview of the background,significance and objectives of this research.Chapter Two is the literature review of this thesis.It gives a brief review of the Adaptation Theory,Obama’s political speech and contextual research from home and abroad.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework used in this thesis--the Adaptation Theory,the research questions and research method.Chapter Four is the key part of this thesis,it is the concrete analysis of Obama’s speech from contextual correlates.For communicative context,Obama takes into consideration the current social background and social setting,and chooses the appropriate words and expressions to adapt to listeners’ physical,social and mental worlds.For linguistic context,Obama utilizes a variety of cohesion and intertextuality to achieve the audiences’ resonance.Chapter Five is the summary part of this thesis,it reveals some existing problems and provides the other researchers with some suggestions for future study.According to this paper,the reasons why Obama’s speeches can move people deeply lie in the following two aspects.On the one hand,he takes into account the audience’s feelings when concerning communicative context.On the other hand,with regard to linguistic context,he uses appropriate language structure to get the audiences’ sympathy in order to accomplish his communicative purposes.The analysis of Obama’s political speech can provide public speaking learners with some enlightenment on how to choose the speech content,how to shape self-image,and how to interact with the audiences,which can improve their public speaking skills.What’s more,the analysis of speech content and investigation on responses from the audiences enable language users to choose appropriate pragmatic strategies when communicate with others,and then achieve their communicative goals.This has a great enlightenmentfor the later researchers.