Cultural Context And Political Discourse

As a speech means that a speaker/writer uses to achieve a certain goal in a certain context, discourse, formally speaking, is the language in use; while in essence, discourse is the juncture to connect language system and social environments. Discourse analysis, therefore, needs not only the study of language itself, but the study of communicative context. Likewise, the analysis of political discourse, say, government press conference (GPC hereafter), must take the social, political, cultural and historical contexts into consideration. And two levels, i.e., speech act level and social act level, should be connected, the former for the locutionary meaning; the latter, the illocutionary meaning. Discourse is a social practice. And discourse has a dialectic relationship with social structure. The present dissertation is divided into 10 chapters.Based on the literature review, Chapter 1 starts with the redefinition of"discourse"and"discourse analysis"for the purpose of studying GPC, a political discourse genre, which is put forward as the research subject in this dissertation. The lack of sufficient attention to and research of CPC indicates the necessity of the present project, the feasibility of which is embodied in the framework established by adopting the perspective of critical discourse analysis, with the cultural-, situational-, and discursive contexts taken into account.By taking into consideration static and dynamic contexts. Chapter 2 builds a framework of production and interpretation of GPC discourse. The macro-contextual analysis of this genre of discourse indicates that the macro cultural context of Chinese GPC results from the composition forces of traditional Confucianism, i.e.,"ren"(仁) and"li"(礼) theory, as well as the modern civilization and the culture by political system in socialist China. This macro cultural context decides Chinese national identity, which has a great impact on the construction and understanding of Chinese GPC discourse, which reflects some underlying ideologies, among which, the conceptual metaphor of"a country is a family"is a prototypical representation. Chapter 3 probes into the situational context, a mid-level context, which exists between macro- and micro- context. The situational context, which is formed by three elements, i.e., discourse field, discourse tenor and discourse mode, decides the institutional nature of GPC discourse and its context, which, interacted with macro-context, brings the ritualized"monologue"pattern of GPC discourse into shape.Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the analysis of the structure of GPC discourse. Considered as a process of speech interaction, GPC discourse manifests itself a stratum structure of transaction-exchange-move-act. The Q-R (Question-Response) part forms the main body of the GPC discourse, with the model of"(pre-head) + head + (post-head)", different models having different meanings and functions.Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the discussion of different roles of GPC discourse, i.e., the roles of spokesperson, journalist, audience, etc in the production and reception of discourse. The choice of discourse role is considered strategically rather than at random.Chapters 8 and 9 illustrate the pragmatic strategies of spokespersons and journalists, respectively, mainly including identity, agenda-setting, evasion, vagueness, reformulation, euphemism, presupposition, to name just a few. The strategies are considered to be the concrete practice of discourse in micro-context, which is influenced by and interacted with macro- and mid- contexts. Chapter 10 summarizes some findings of this dissertation and some implications are offered for speech practice as well.