| As one of the characteristics of language,vagueness shows itself in both written and spoken discourses,and sometimes it is even used in order to achieve certain pragmatic functions.Many researchers have conducted a series of studies on vague language to explore its pragmatic functions as a language strategy in different literature styles.In the American presidential campaign speech which is a kind of political discourse,vagueness is often embodied.When giving campaign speeches,presidential candidates will use a variety of language strategies to fight against each other,win more voters,and ultimately win the election victory.Vagueness,as one of the language strategies,often has important pragmatic effects in the campaign speeches.This thesis mainly focuses on the intentional use of vagueness and its pragmatic functions in the American presidential campaign speeches.To study the vague expressions in the American presidential campaign speeches,including whether the expression is obvious,how it is expressed,whether it adapts to the language environment,and what pragmatic functions are achieved,the author selects 81 campaign speeches delivered by Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential campaign,and then studies the vagueness used in those speeches under the framework of Adaptation Theory.Through the corpus analysis and case analysis,the author finds that vagueness is clearly reflected in the American presidential campaign speeches,embodied in lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.Vagueness in the lexical level includes vague nouns,verbs,adjectives,adverbs,modal verbs,personal pronouns,numbers etc.Vagueness in syntactic level mainly includes vague subjects,objects,conditional clauses,attributive clauses,fixed collocations,etc.Vagueness in the discourse level includes repetition,paralleled attributive clauses,implication in discourse,etc.Vagueness from those three levels reflects that the presidential candidates make adaptation to both linguistic contexts and non-linguistic contexts,which concretely are adaptation to the mental world,the social world and the physical world.Some pragmatic functions are performed by adaptation to those three worlds,like arousing audiences’ feelings,creating and maintaining harmonious foreign atmosphere,evoking audiences’ oppositions to the opponent,strengtheningobjectivity,seeking acceptation by local people and avoiding being criticized,etc. |
