An Exploration Of China Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's Remarks Within Relevance-Adaptation Model

China Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly holds press conferences inviting the reporters both home and abroad. At the press conference, the spokesperson answers various questions that the reporters ask. Spokesperson's remarks have its own linguistic characteristics different from daily used language, such as euphemism, implicitness, vagueness, wordiness and so on. Obviously, spokesperson's remark is a prosperous language and can provide abundant material for linguistic research. So there are both realistic significance and practical value to study spokesperson's remarks. Now, almost spokesperson's remarks were studied from strategies perspective in China. These studies are beneficial to the spokesperson to use the language. However, for the spokesperson's remark, a prosperous language, they didn't give an enough explanation to the production and interpretation of spokesperson's remarks. But relevance-adaptation model can. The author of the thesis thinks the study of China Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks'production process can help us to understand them deeply.The thesis analyzes China Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks from relevance-adaptation model. The thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces research objectives and significances, the outline of this thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review of this thesis. Chapter Three is the theoretical framework of this thesis and research methodology, introduction to the foundation and main views of the relevance-adaptation theory. This theory proposes language use is a dynamic process of adapting to various contexts and making constant choices based on the optimal relevance. Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis which aims at better showing the essential process of the production and the interpretation of spokesperson's remarks by utilizing the relevance-adaptation theory to analyze the collected spokesperson's remarks with the qualitative and descriptive methods. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis, which summarizes the major contributions of the study, followed by some research limitations and future suggestions. The source of data is loaded down from China Foreign Ministry press conference. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China is responsible for holding Chinese regular press conferences that disseminate information about foreign affairs, revealing diplomatic relationships, strategies, decisions and attitudes of the government. Then, the source of data is further chosen from the spokesperson's remarks of China Foreign Ministry press conference from each month except August in 2010. The number of the spokesperson's remarks is 242. Then parts of the chosen spokesperson's remarks were studied in this thesis. The standards of corpus selected cover all aspects of spokesperson's remarks, such as politics, economy, military affairs, etc.. This thesis will make specific description and analysis on the selected corpus, and then draw the conclusion based on integrating the analyzed results. Under the framework of relevance-adaptation model, the thesis revisits spokesperson's remarks, and concludes that spokesperson's remark is a process of relevance-adaptation. It probes into the processes of production and interpretation of spokesperson's remarks. The study makes its own contribution to the systematic study on spokesperson's remarks.