Pragmatic Study On Ellipsis In Obama's Weekly Speeches

Ellipsis is a common language phenomenon which aims at accomplishing communication more effectively.Moreover,ellipsis can also reach some special goals in some situations.Studies on ellipsis from abroad and home never break off.Scholars have studied ellipsis from different perspectives,for instance,from angles of grammar,semantics or pragmatics.Some also have studied the definitions and the classification of ellipsis.These studies on pragmatic functions of ellipsis are also done with different materials.However,researches on the pragmatic functions of ellipsis in speech discourse are scarcely conducted.Therefore,this research aims to study the pragmatic functions of ellipsis in speech.Constructing corpus with Obama?s 43 speeches in 2016 as research material,this paper finds out ellipses in these speeches first.Then,these ellipses are counted and classified according to Quirk?s classification of ellipsis.And analysis on the pragmatic functions of ellipsis is done on the basis of Communicative Functions,Speech Acts Theory and the Cooperative Principle.Some conclusions are drawn based on the analysis.Ellipsis has many different functions and the most basic and common one is avoiding redundancy.In addition,functions of emphasizing new information,intensifying emotion and expressing intimacy are also reflected in these speeches.Because of the special theme and characteristics,one special function is showed like emphasizing the theme.It is hoped that this paper can help learners have a holistic understanding and better using of ellipsis.