Individualism And Collectivism Manifested In Discourse-A Comparative Study Of Sino-American Acceptance Speech

With the development of globalization and internationalization, communications between different countries in politics, economics, industry, academics, and some other fields have been significantly accelerated and deepened. Intercultural communication becomes a popular subject in the academic field and everyday life. Based on the previous researches on pragmatic and intercultural communication study, the thesis makes comparative analysis of the value orientations manifested in discourse of different cultures, attempting to examine the motivation and background of these differences.Acceptance speech is chosen as the target data for the research. The thesis focuses on the cultural value of individualism/collectivism - one of the most salient value orientations raised by Hofstede. It explores how and in what way that individualism and collectivism shapes people's behaviours and is manifested in people's discourses. The analysis is based on a corpus of the last three years acceptance speeches in movie ceremonies. Five pairs of data are collected and given comparative analysis both qualitatively and quantitatively.The thesis makes analysis on the data from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, functional grammar, combined with other approaches of discourse analysis. To address the questions, we analyze the words choosing, people being mentioned, relationships between people mentioned and the addressor, and the transitivity processes of each speech. Comparative studies of the parameters are made to see the differences between the two cultures. The award speeches reflect the value of the addressors'social and cultural circle, and the group to which addressor choose his affiliation. The relationships between people mentioned and the addressor reflect addressor's social orientation. The transitivity process reflects the self-construal, subjectivity of the addressor. All of these manifestations help us grasp people's value orientation.People always hold that Chinese tend to be more collectivistic and westerners tend to be more individualistic. The analysis shows Americans are more individualism in constructing the identity of self and in the way of addressing the discourse. Chinese are comparatively collectivistic in these aspects. While as to the intimate social and cultural circle, Americans and Chinese are both found to be collectivistic, just attach to different groups. In brief, culture is dynamic, pluralistic, and multi-dimensioned. We should take it objectively, comprehensively and dialectically. Through the study of intercultural communication we can have better understanding of other cultures, and also ourselves.