| The New Year's Editorials of People's Daily(NYES for short hereafter),issued at a designated time every year as political proclamations through the official mainstream media,set out to get across Chinese experience through Chinese expressions,to well tell Chinese stories,and to air Chinese voices.Thus they are typically Chinese political expressions.NYES have recorded,witnessed,participated and facilitated social changes in China for the last 70 years.No studies on NYES were available until 2002 when sinologists abroad embarked on the topic for their research.Domestic researches on this topic,as late comers,were scan,scare and scattered.No comprehensive studies of NYES beginning from 1949 up to now are available,let alone relevant studies from a rhetorical perspective.Therefore,the present study is of theoretical significance and practical value.The present dissertation has applied the theory of “Two Subjects and Three Levels”of Big Rhetoric,or rhetoric in its broad sense,to analyses of the expressions of NYES.The editorials have been retrieved from the People's Daily Database,covering 71 ones in total from 1949 to 2019.An integrated method has been used to analyze the discoursers,words,sentences,political metaphors and multimodal rhetorical identification of NYES,integrated in that analyses have been made synchronically,diachronically,quantitatively and qualitatively from linguistic,historical and cultural perspectives,covering the rhetorical role of NYES in social changes,the discursive,textual and philosophical dimensions of NYES,and the decoding of the existent and potential paradigms in telling good Chinese stories through Chinese expressions.Rhetorical activity is redefined in Big Rhetoric as “the aesthetic activity of bringing about optimal communicative effects by both utterance producer and receiver.” NYES,both as effective discursive means and authoritative persuading modes,are intended to steer public opinions and reach agreements on social values.Regarding the expressions in NYES,optimal communicative effects are as good as the optimal effects of political communication.On the two poles of any rhetorical activity are production and reception.The expressions of NYES are actually information exchanges between the fields of political communication,official opinions and popular opinions.The optimal effects of political communication are the successful announcements,both legal and authoritative,of construction achievements,thus leading public opinions to form positive political cognition and attitudes so as to strengthen correct political acts for social solidarity.At the lexical level,NEYS can clarify their existent and potential discursive paradigms through decoding “new” and “old” chronological expressions,dialectical“repudiation” and “proposition” and commentary “gains” and “loses”.Observations and explanations have been made in light of Big Rhetoric of the appreciative and depreciative taints of the expressions of NEYS along with their historical changes.Analyses have been made of the declaratives for social calls,the statements for value orientation,and exclamations for discursive emphasis as well as metaphorical expressions.All this has demonstrated some laws of their diachronic changes.The inherent relationship between NEYS and social changes has thus been clarified through analyses of NEYS themselves,portraits of the Party's leaders,celebrating rituals,the rhetorical identification of linguistic,picturesque and behavioural construction.Such a relationship can be highlighted as follows: social changes exert influence on the text content and rhetorical form of NEYS,which,in return,help to form positive public opinions,reach consensuses on development and reforms and finally promote social progress.The will of the Party and the Government are mirrored in such serious political text as NEYS.The present dissertation will hopefully provide new perspectives in Big Rhetoric to account for similar studies in linguistics,communication and socio-historical researches. |
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