| A news conference or press conference is a special media event in which newsmakers invite journalists to hear them speak and, most often, ask questions. It is a good combination of publicity and news briefing. The government press conference is the most prominent and influential press conference in terms of its scale, rank, significance, and news value. More and more media home and abroad show great interest in the press conference held by the Chinese government. The structure of a government press conference is based on question-answer pairs made by correspondents and the government representatives; the nature of a government press conference is a combination of information enquiry and information release. Generally speaking, the government, aiming the positive publicity, and the media, relying on the government for the news resources, mean to cooperate in the first place. However, in the special news event featuring question and answering, some questions posed by the media, especially the foreign media, touch upon some highly sensitive,controversial and thorny international affairs, or some confidential, personal, and embarrassing issues, which make the explicit answer impossible. Through the pragmatic analysis of the questions and answers (Q and A) in the Chinese government news conference, frequent violation of the maxim/maxims of Cooperative Principle (CP) is sensed and basically it observes the maxims of the Politeness Principle (PP).This thesis is a detailed analysis of the Conversational Implicature (CI) in the Chinese government press conferences from the perspectives of the CP and the PP. These theories are carefully reviewed to provide a clear theoretical framework and tool for analyzing the CI. Press conferences by Premier Wen Jiabao, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, former Premier Zhu Rongji, former Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, and former Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai in recent years are chosen to carry out the case study to find out:1. In the Chinese government press conferences, in what context is/are the CP maxim/maxims violated? 2. How the CP maxim/maxims is/are violated?3. What message is intended to convey in the press conference, namely what's the CI in the special context?Generally, the thesis is working on when (the context), what (which maxim/maxims of CP is/are violated), why (the motivation), and how the maxim/maxims of CP (the strategies) is/are violated and the maxims of the PP are observed, and meanwhile CI can be worked out.The pragmatic analysis of the press conference with CP and PP work out the CI and explain what is the literal meaning and its real intention in communication. The application of CP and PP in the real news event also makes us have a deeper understanding of these cornerstone pragmatic theories. Pragmatic theories are usually applied in analyzing the pragmatic phenomenon in the daily human communication, in the literature works, in the movies or in the special occasions like the court interrogation. Seldom are they employed to analyze the government news events like the press conferences. Similarly, press conferences have been studied extensively in terms of diplomatic euphemism, language vagueness, interpreter's skills, and critical discourse analysis, etc. But the conversations in the press conferences are seldom interpreted within the pragmatic framework. In addition to it, the pragmatic analysis of the government press conferences enables us to gain more insight into the volatile international situation and have a clearer picture of China's independent foreign policy featuring Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.
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