An Analysis Of The Pragmatic Strategies Employed By China's Spokespersons In Their Remarks (English Transcript) On The Sino-US Issues In 2008

This thesis intends to study the pragmatic strategies employed by the spokespersons at China's Regular Press Conferences(CRPC) with the theory of Grice's Cooperative Principle(CP) and Leech's Politeness Principle(PP).Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to study the spokesperson's pragmatic strategies in the thesis.The small-scale corpus with 30,000 English words containing 191 questions and answers concerning Sino-US relationships and issues was set up.The case study is the main qualitative method.Each case is analyzed with the maxims of CP and PP.The results are classified and analyzed with the method of statistics.The results indicate that the spokesperson completely observes conversational maxims for a proportion of the 191 cases.The observance of the maxims of quality, quantity,relevance and manner is helpful for the listeners to obtain the truthful, sufficient,relevant and orderly information.There are usually two occasions when the spokesperson violates the conversational maxims:Due to the complicated nature of diplomacy,the spokesperson cannot provide confirmed information in the occasion; he/she has to violate the maxim of quantity in order to observe the maxim of quality and avoid the language duty.The other occasion is when the spokesperson deliberately flouts one of the maxims and he/she makes the listener realize that he/she has breached the maxim at the same time,so that the listeners can infer the implicit meaning.Moreover,since the diplomatic language is formal and polite,most of the time,the spokesperson observes PP.But when the questions containing the messages that may affect China's interests,for instance,the interference with China's internal affairs,the distortion of facts,the spokesperson will violate maxims of PP in order to correct the false views and maintain national interests.Because of the special features of diplomatic language,all the six maxims are not covered when the spokesperson observes or violates the maxims.The spokesperson mainly observes the maxims of Tact, Approbation,Agreement and Sympathy;he/she mainly violates the maxims of Generosity,Approbation,Modesty and Agreement.