A Contrastive Study Of Evasive Answers Employed By Chinese And American Foreign Ministry Spokespersons At Regular Press Conferences

Foreign Ministry Regular Press Conference is the main and important platform which is used by the government to update official information instantly;therefore,it has attracted much attention of the journalists.At regular press conference,the journalists often come up with the sensitive questions to “pry for information”,and even attempt to guide public voice.In this condition,it is not accessible to the spokespersons to show the answers which may be bad for the country’s image and profits,and it is also unwise to pose threats to the face of the journalists,so the evasive answer becomes the best choice.Evasive answer has attracted much attention for its implication;the employment of the evasive answer can protect the answer from being trapped into the embarrassing environment,while it can also cost much more processing efforts of the questioners for it is inexplicable,therefore,it is necessary to explore the true intention behind the evasive answer.As a matter of fact,Bavelasteal,Bull,Clayman,Mayer and many other foreign scholars have studied the evasive answers under foreign context from the perspective of the social psychology from 1980 s.In recent years,many scholars have transferred into the linguistics to do the studies,such as the Adaptation Theory.Among those,the studies which stress the foreign regular press conferences are not enough.Therefore,this study is based on the typologies of the evasive answers of Bull & Mayer,taking advantage of the Relevance Theory,Face Theory and the High and Low context Theory to explore the evasions which are employed at Chinese and American regular press conferences.For the sake of insuring the efficiency of the linguistic data and narrowing the gap on the amount of the linguistic data between Chinese and American regular press conferences,this study selects 48 and 12 texts of regular press conferences respectively from the official websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and America as linguistic data and all the linguistic data comes from 2015.By making use of the quantitative and qualitative analysis,the present study identifies and classifies the linguistic data and then does a contrastive analysis to them for the purpose of exploring the using of the evasive answers at Chinese and American regular press conferences;in the meanwhile,the similarities and dissimilarities in using evasive strategies and the reasons behind them are also be explored.The findings of this study are: first,the proportions of the using of the evasive answers at Chinese and American regular press conferences are 91.6% and 81.5%.After analyzing those evasive answers,the study finds that it is unattainable for the spokespersons to show complete answers for there exist conflicts on communicative intention between the spokespersons and the journalists,and in this condition,the evasive answers become the most related answers.In addition,the study finds that there are similarities and dissimilarities between Chinese and American spokespersons in the way of using evasive strategies.The same point is that both of them incline to employ evasive answers;the different point is that Chinese spokespersons incline to use the covert evasive strategies,but American spokespersons would rather choose overt ones.In the end,from the view of the Face Theory and the High and Low context Theory,the study explores the causes for the different using of the evasive strategies.In the meanwhile,the present study provides advice for the further studies on evasive answers by pointing out that the studies which are based on interdisciplinary and different angles are expected to be done in the future.