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Obama made his speeches around several major topics. First of all, which is also the most significant is to overcome racial limitations and encourage to build a nation for all Americans. This topic is closely related to his experience as a child born with different cultural backgrounds. At Obama’s parents’ time, the marriage between the black and white was not legally recognized. Obama’s mixed blood background is rare at his generation. Because of his special identity, Obama can understand the life of the immigrants deeper than any other candidates and that is why Obama emphasis the racial problem in his election most. The success of Obama is not only inpidual but also a mile stone in the American racial history.
Another major topic of Obama’s speeches is to benefit the most Americans. Unlike former American presidents, Obama was not born in a rich family. He was not supported by either a prominent family or countless money. While making his speeches, Obama often recalled his ordinary growing experience. He came from a working class family. Without hard work and scholarship, he can hardly go to the best high school and university in America. After graduation he became a volunteer by which he made his contribution to the society. Before he became Mr. President, his life had nothing to do with rich. Even on the day he made the keynote speech on the Democratic National Convention, he had to rent a second hand car to attend the meeting. He came from the working class and was once as ordinary as any other American. Such experience helped him to see what the ordinary Americans see and worry what the ordinary Americans worry. His plan included every aspects of life such as education, medical treatment and social security. The American public believes him for he always spoke out exactly what they want to say.
However, among all the books that study Obama’s speeches, a book called Say It Like Obama and WIN has caught my attention. This book was written by Shel Leanne and published by Mc Graw Hill publish house. In this book the author selected the speeches that worth learning and made a detailed analysis. What’s more, she made a conclusion of the speaking techniques of Obama and taught the readers how to use them in their daily life. It seems most of the books that analysis Obama’s speeches were focusing on the content, diction or speaking skills. Little did people treat the speeches from the angle of linguistic which tells us the deeper reason of Obama’s success in public speaking. In this paper, the analysis of the pragmatic strategies used in his speeches will be made as a creative try.
Before analyzing the specific strategies, an introduction to the theoretical foundation of this study is necessary. It is obvious that the pragmatic theories are the base of the pragmatic strategies. In this study the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle will be especially mentioned. It was Herbert Paul Grice who firstly advanced the Cooperative Principle in his book Logic and Conversation in 1975. He believes the participants of a conversation have a common purpose to guide them to help each other in order to finish the conversation. To further illustrate the cooperative principle, he borrowed from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant the ideas of quantity, quality, relation and manner. He developed the cooperative principle into four aspects: the maxim of quantity that is to make one’s contribution as informative as required; the maxim of quality that is to make sure one’s contribution is true; the maxim of relation that is to be relevant and the maxim of manner that is to be perspicuous.
In Grice’s cooperative principle, he only studies the relationship between the literal meaning and its implication. However, he did not explain why people violet the maxims to communicate in a implicated way. In 1983, Leech’s politeness principle to some extent answered this question. Like Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle also have maxims: maxim of tact, maxim of generosity, maxim of approbation, maxim of modesty, maxim of agreement and maxim of sympathy.