A Study On Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesmen's Pragmatic Strategies By Using Adaptation Theory

In China, Ministry of foreign affairs held two press conferences weekly through which they post messages and answer journalists'questions. This is an important bridge between Chinese and foreign countries to enhance communication and mutual understanding. Based on summary and analysis of the text record which were declared by Foreign Ministry spokesmen at 93 news conferences in the year 2008, this paper studied Foreign Ministry spokesmen's pragmatic strategies by using adaptation theory and further investigated the constraints of selecting strategies.At first, according to variability of linguistic, this paper summarized pragmatic strategies in two ways:macro, micro. For macro, we divided the strategies into indirect and direct answer, inform strategies and avoid strategies. On this basis, we discussed four kinds of pragmatic strategies:directly inform, indirectly inform, directly avoid, indirectly avoid. For micro, we focused on indirect strategies, the indirectly inform strategies include indirect instruction, positive and negative, statement instead of answering; and indirect avoid strategies can be divided into five inferior strategies:vague answer, shift the focus, offensive avoid, use an excuse, use rhetorical questions.The second, according to adaptation of linguistic, different kinds of strategies have different frequency of use. To find out the reasons, we made further discussion of constraints that affect the choice of strategies use.Based on adaptation theory, principles of cooperation, the principle of face and so on, this paper analyzed constraints that affect spokesmen's choice of strategies use and summarized five reasons:adaptation of context, adaptation of the content of questions, adaptation of the ways that questions are proposed by, adaptation of conversational principles, adaptation of language features.In short, the choice of pragmatic strategies adapt to various factors. This paper summarized the law, and gives some references to how to answer reporters'questions.