A Cross-Cultural Study On Interpersonal Meanings In The Speeches Of Chinese And American Foreign Ministry Spokesmen

As a significant medium for the government to release information and influence public voice, foreign press conference plays an important role in diplomatic work. It includes both the journalists’ questions and the spokesmen’s responses. The journalists on behalf of the media to get worthy information, while spokesmen represent government to release information and state standpoint. Previous studies of the speeches of Foreign Ministry spokesmen are made mainly from the perspectives of Journalism, Public Relations, Politics, Rhetoric, Pragmatics and so on, but research on speeches of Foreign Ministry spokesmen in the perspective of Systemic-Functional Grammar is thin on the ground. In this thesis, the author attempts to make a contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning and its realizations in the speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen. And then the author will analyze the causes of these similarities and differences in light of Hofstede’s theory of Cultural Dimensions.Interpersonal metafunction refers to the function of language that can not only convey information, but also express the speaker’s status, position, attitude, judgment and so on. The speaker tries to establish and maintain relationships, as well as affect others’ attitude and behavior. The realizations of interpersonal meaning employed in this thesis are mood system, modality system and person system.The thesis adopts both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis as research methods. The author randomly downloads altogether 30 pieces of press conferences via the Internet ranging from September 2014 to December 2014 from the website of PRC Foreign Ministry(http://www.fmprc.gov.cn) and the website of Department of the United States(http:// www. state. gov). This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1) How are interpersonal meanings realized in the speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen in terms of mood, modality, and person system?(2) What similarities and differences are there between the realizations of interpersonal meanings of the speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen?(3) What are the causes of these similarities and differences in light of Hofstede’s theory of Cultural Dimensions?Based on the contrastive analysis, the author gets the following conclusions:Firstly, in realizing mood, modality and person system, the author makes a contrastive analysis from the perspectives of speech functions, mood types, modality types, modality orientation, modality value,the first person pronoun,the second person pronoun, and the third person pronoun of both speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen in detail.Secondly,after the contrastive analysis between speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen,the author finds out that both Chinese and American spokesmen prefer to select declarative as the first choice.Besides this similarity,they are also inclined to choose implicit orientation sentences and the first person pronoun to express their attitudes and opinions.However,American spokesmen tend to use more affirmative declaratives,more low modal operators,and more first person pronoun“I”to express their opinions,and they are more subjective in implicit orientation.On the contrary,Chinese spokesmen use high modal operators and first person pronoun“我们”frequently,and they are more objective in implicit orientation.Thirdly, according to Hofstede, China belongs to a country with high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, less masculinity, and long-term oriented culture. However, American culture is low power distance, low uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity, and short-term oriented. These five cultural dimensions have different effects on ideologies, behaviors, and feelings of people from different countries. Thus, they are the essential causes of the differences between the speeches of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokesmen.