A Contrastive Analysis Between Chinese And American State Funeral Eulogies

This thesis contrastively examines two state funeral eulogies delivered by Chinese and American national leaders respectively in state funerals for memorizing their former national leaders accordingly. This thesis employs Fairclough's three dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis to examine state funeral eulogy at three levels: a textual level, a discourse level, and a socio-cultural level. The findings reveal that:1) From the aspect of lexical choice, Chinese national leader preferred to use form words and set words to express the formality of a national funeral. And Chinese national leader employed more adjectives and adverbs to express the intensity of affection while the American president used many informal words and expressions to soften the atmosphere in the national funeral;2) From the aspect of cohesion devices, Chinese national leader used more complex references and ellipsis than American President did;3) From the perspective of function, Chinese state funeral eulogy valued the contributions made by the decedent, showing the value of death in Confucianism while the American one emphasized the affection of the decedent's family, reflecting the common existing thinking pattern of individualism;...