A Discourse Analysis Of Chinese Entrepreneurs' Discourses In Contrast With Those Of Western Entrepreneurs'

This thesis is intended to apply theories and methodologies of cross-cultural contrastive discourse analysis to the analysis of Chinese entrepreneurs' discourses in contrast with those of western entrepreneurs'. The thesis is divided into four parts and deals with the following issues respectively.Chapter One is a survey of the theories and methodologies concerning cross-cultural contrastive discourse analysis. The development of contrastive discourse analysis owes its appearance to discourse analysis, which, since its first appearance in 1952, has undergone numerous studies and revisions that have incorporated new and valuable insight into various perspectives. The data for contrastive discourse analysis subsume three types. The first is target and source texts in translation; the second is texts written in different languages but conveying the same message; the third is a group of texts written in different languages but have similar registers. Theories and methodologies of contrastive discourse analysis are attributed to such linguistic branches as functional grammar and pragmatics. Functional contrastive discourse analysis perceives three semiotic categories, field, mode and tenor in which perhaps tenor that concerns such overlapping categories as formality, syntactic structures, authority and technicality is most important. The application of such pragmatic theories as the Speech Act theory and politeness theory is the point of departure of pragmatic contrastive discourse analysis. The Speech Act theory initiated by J. Austin and later developed by J. Searle, perceives the forces of utterances of making actions. J. Searle developed Austin's classification of illocutionary acts in which the definitions of assertives, commissives and declarations are presented in this thesis. The theory of politeness can be seen as one of the basic social guidelines for human interation. The Scollons investigate two politeness strategies of involvement and independence, and further develop two face politeness strategies, the inductive rhetorical strategy and the deductive rhetorical strategy. FTA (face-threatening acts) advocated by Brown and Levinson provides a ground for the speaker's judgement of conversation strategies. Basil Hatim extends the basic theory of "politeness" and applies it to the analysis of the politeness of discourses. Ideology of discourses plays a part iri features of discourses with the Utilitarianism contributing to the western discourse system and Collectivism contributing to the Chinese discourse system. Chapter Two deals with the theory of cultranslation, which is based on the indispensable relationship between language, culture and translation. The part that follows is a review of the long debated terms of "equivalence" and "adequacy" that are attributed to Nida and Reiss respectively. It is widely accepted that there is no absolute equivalence in translation due to the discrepancy of cultures. But there should be equivalence at the textual level. Three purposes in translation play a role in translation, translators' own purpose, the communicative purpose of the target text and the purpose of employing translation strategies to show the particularities of certain aspect of the source language like the style. The source text serves certaincommunicative function or functions that vary in accordance with the text type. In translating work, translators is transposing the source-language text into the target language text and should be very cautious to examine whether the function of the source text is maintained because markers identifying source text function should be adapted to those of the target culture standards to keep the function of the source text invariant. This chapter also analyzes factors affecting translators that subsume patrons or initiators, readers' reflection, among which patrons or initiators may affect translators' work by exerting influence on their ideology. Finally the degree to which a source text may be translated in particular social and cultural conditions are d...