A Contrastive Analysis Between Chinese And American State Leaders' Discourses

The thesis is intended to apply theories and methodologies of cross-cultural contrastive discourse analysis to the analysis of Chinese state leaders' discourses[1] in contrast with those of American state leaders'. The thesis is divided into four parts and deals with the following issues respectively.Chapter one is a retrospection of the development of contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis and contrastive discourse analysis. The development of contrastive linguistics abroad is attributed to such linguists as Whorf, Lado, C. James, Fiaisk and Basil Hatim, and in China, it is also the concern of many Chinese scholars, including Zhao Yuanren, Lu Shuxiang, Zhao Shikai, Xu Yulong and so on. Since first put forward by Whorf in 1941, contrastive linguistics has covered a long history of development from the contrast on the lexical level to that on the discoursal level, from the contrast between languages to that between cultures. During the course many other branches have been incorporated into its study, one of which is discourse analysis. The development of contrastive discourse analysis owes its appearance partly to contrastive linguistics, while, we must admit, still partly 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. With contrastive linguistics and discourse analysis growing immensely in the recent decades, some linguists, such as Basil Hatim, the Scollons abroad, and Liu Miqing, Huang Guowen in our country have attempted to meaningfully fuse the two-hence "contrastive discourse analysis", which has attracted more and more attention in this field.Chapter two deals with a survey of the theories and methodologies concerning cross-cultural contrastive discourse analysis. Theories and methodologies of contrastive discourse analysis in my thesis are attributed to a mixture of such linguistic branches as functional discourse analysis, pragmatics,critical discourse analysis and culturology. Functional discourse analysis perceives three semiotic categories-field, mode and tenor-in which tenor attracts my attention as concerning such overlapping categories as formality, authority and technicality. The application of such pragmatic theories as politeness theory supplies contrastive discourse analysis with a pragmatic perspective.The Scollons investigate two politeness strategies of involvement and independence, then further develop two rhetorical strategies-the inductive strategy and the deductive strategy. Besides, FTA (face-threatening acts) advocated by Brown and Levinson provides a ground for the speaker's judgment of conversation strategies in a certain text type. On this basis, Basil Hatim extends the basic theory of "politeness" and applies it to the analysis of the politeness of discourses. In addition to contrastive discourse analysis on the linguistic level, some linguists have ventured to investigate the differences on the cultural level, such as those in patterns of thought, values, in which some different linguistic forms can find their sources.Chapter three is devoted to the contrastive analysis between Chinese and American state leaders' discourses, with the aim to show both theoretical and practical insights into various linguistic forms from the perspective of functional grammar, pragmatics and so on. In order to avoid the error caused by different cultural variables in different western countries, the thesis just takes American state leaders' discourses, instead of those of western leaders' in the contrast analysis with Chinese ones. Differences lying in tenor, texture, politeness strategies, rhetorical strategies, together with those on the lexical level and sentence level between Chinese and American state leaders' discourses are some of the issues explored in this part. Then the differences between Chinese and American patterns of thought will be explored to give an explanation for those in linguistic forms. In most of my analysis here, I adopt illu...