The Negation Of The China Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's Remarks

This paper studies the 94 remarks of the foreign ministry spokesperson's regular press conferences from March 4th, 2008 to February 26th, 2009. It investigates the causes of the use of negation by analyzing the types of negation in foreign ministry spokesperson's remarks and combining them with related pragmatic theories.First, the negation in the foreign ministry spokesperson's remarks is defined as the negation to the request of the journalists, when the spokesperson cannot satisfy journalists with the best answers. The negation could be divided into two types: the direct negation and the indirect negation. The direct negation includes negation of will, negation of being informed and negation of capability while the indirect negation includes dominant indirect negation and implied indirect negation. The dominant indirect negation comprises of supplying reasons, suggestions and commitments while the implied indirect negation comprises of transferring, negating the known information, expanding, controlling, neglecting information on purpose. The using frequency of the implied indirect negation is higher than other types; it occupies 42% of all types of negation in spokesperson's remarks.It is conclude that the differences in the negation answers can attribute to the two factors: politeness and relevance. This paper summarizes the situation in which the spokesperson follow or violate the politeness theory and relevance theory by combining the related theory. On this base, seven topics including the relationship between spokesperson and journalists; the role and the position of spokesperson; the purpose of communication etc are illuminated to explain the reason for choosing different kind of negation.