A Pragmatic Study of Evasion in Theresa Mays' Political Interviews

Evasion is defined as a strategy, used by politicians trying not to give direct answer or to escape from the right answer The present paper aims to study the evasion strategy in the political interviews, the study investigates evasion in Theresa May's political interviews on pragmatic level. The present study presents a brief definitions about evasion, types of evasion and which type is heavily most by May, functions that she fulfilled in her interviews, and what are the tactics that she uses to evade to answer the question. This study also investigates which maxim of Grice is violated in the political interviews. The analysis consists of data on six texts of interviews with Theresa May from 2016 to 2019. The results summarize the conclusions which the study reached at. Among these conclusions is that evasion has an essential role in the political interviews, and politicians tend to use it to fulfill certain functions such as talking about special issues that leading to arguments into media. Politicians also tend to evade answering the question in covert way more than overt. Grice's Maxims are violated by politicians especially the relevance and manner. Politicians use several techniques in order to evade the question, diplo speech is most widely used by them.