A Contrastive Study Of Personal References In Chinese And English Public Political Speeches

Reference is one of the most concerned topics in linguistics, and different fields, such as semantics, syntax, pragmatics and cognition, have their own theories in explaining this phenomenon. Personal reference is the most frequently used one in comparison with other types of references. The contrastive studies of personal reference between Chinese and English have been conducted by scholars both at home and abroad. However, most of them are concerned with the theoretical explanation itself and only a few conduct quantitative analysis. What's more, the discourse in which personal reference is studied is not so specific. Therefore, the present thesis chooses a new angle to investigate personal reference—public political speech.Public political speech is quite different from other genre, and it has the features of its own, among which persuasiveness is the most important. To fulfill this purpose, the speaker must carefully use every expression. This thesis is to investigate personal reference in public political speeches for the purpose of finding out the special usage of personal reference and their similarities and differences between Chinese and English public political speeches. It first conducts a quantitative analysis to generalize the usage and the similarities and differences of personal reference between public political speeches of the two languages and then employs Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and the related theories to illustrate this phenomenon.The present study chooses twenty-four speeches, ten Chinese ones and fourteen English ones. The word number in Chinese and English corpus is similar. Through a detailed quantitative analysis, we find that Chinese and English public political speeches show great similarities in the use of personal references: first person, especially its plural form, is much more frequently used than other persons; and the plural form of first person, if used skillfully, will produce amazing result. The differences are also obvious: English employs more personal pronouns than definite descriptions, while Chinese uses more definite descriptions than personal pronouns; proper names in Chinese often appear with some titles while those in English usually occur alone; in addition, zero reference is quite common in Chinese, but rarely seen in English; as for reflexives, the two languages have significant differences in frequency of occurrence and distribution; in English, there is a unique device concerning personal reference—relative pronouns, which is a compensatory device in English for conciseness; vocatives are quite different in the two languages, with Chinese speakers preferring to use the plural form of some nouns and English speakers liking to use first person possessive form plus nouns. Finally, we explain those findings according to Halliday's SFG and the related theories: cohesion theory in textual function, interpersonal meaning and engagement theory in interpersonal function and the social and cultural factors that influence language use.This is only a micro research on personal reference in Chinese and English public political speeches. We hope that it will contribute to the theoretical study of personal reference and deepen people's comprehension of Chinese and English.