A Contrastive Analysis Of The Evasive Strategies In Chinese And American Press Conferences: An OT Perspective

Evasive strategies are frequently adopted by spokesmen in press conferences in response to difficult and troublesome questions raised by journalists. The thesis is aimed at the exploration of the Chinese and American spokesmen's choices of the evasive strategies in press conferences within the framework of the Optimality Theory as well as the reasons underlying the differences in their choices. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses is employed in processing the data collected from 30 press conferences held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and 30 press conferences held by the U.S. Department of StateThe Optimality Theory was put forward by Prince and Smolensky in 1990s, which originally took phonological problems as its research object, but now it has been applied to a wide variety of fields such as semantics, syntax, 1st and 2nd language acquisition, and pragmatics and so on. OT grammar consists of three components: Lexicon, Generator and Evaluator. Lexicon contains underlying representations, which form input to the Generator; Generator generates candidates for the input; Evaluator evaluates the candidates and selects the optimal one. Constraints and their hierarchical ranking are the cores of OT. OT constraints are universal to all languages and violable. Languages vary from each other due to their differences in the hierarchies of the constraints. So OT has taken both the universality and uniqueness of languages into consideration.The spokesmen in both Chinese and American press conferences tend to utilize a large variety of evasive strategies, including Fuzziness, Euphemism, Understatement, Presupposition, Deliberate Misinterpretation and Overt Evasion. The constraints on their choices of evasive strategies mainly include Truthfulness, Relevance, Perspicuity, Quantity, Approbation, Generosity, Agreement and Tact, originating from Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle. All above the evasive strategies are found out and the constraints are established on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis.By means of the quantitative analysis, it is found that Chinese and English spokesmen exhibit different tendencies in their choices of evasive strategies in three situations. Generally, in response to the accusatory, politically sensitive and provocative questions, Chinese people prefer the strategies of Fuzziness, Presupposition and Overt Evasion to Deliberate Misinterpretation, Understatement and Euphemism whereas American spokesmen tend to choose the strategy of Overt Evasion far more than Understatement and Deliberate Misinterpretation. These quantitative results are respectively demonstrated in the six OT tableaus for the Chinese and American hierarchies of constraints on the choices of evasive strategies in the three situations.Through further qualitative analysis, it is found that there are some social, philosophical, religious and historical reasons underlying the Sino-American differences in the choices of evasive strategies in press conferences. From the social perspective, Chinese people uphold li whereas American people esteem law. Accordingly, Chinese people attach importance to harmonious neighborhood, friendship, solidarity and cooperation in communication whereas American people highly value individualism and equal rights in speech. From philosophical perspective, Chinese uphold collectivism, social harmony and the Oneness between Human and Nature whereas American esteem power, individual value and the Dividedness between Human and Nature. From religious perspective, Chinese people, under the pervasive influence of Taoism, would accept the fact of social rankings and exhibit tolerance, modesty and tendency to comprise whereas American people, under the influence of Christianity, attaches importance to human needs, human rights endowed by God and social equality. From historical perspective, the long history of feudalist society has left China many deep-rooted feudalist concepts and norms which our social conducts should abide by. On the contrary, American had not gone through feudalist society, which left few restrictions on American people's conducts, including their speech act.This thesis is concluded by pointing out that in spite of its theoretical and practical significances, this research leaves a lot of space to be improved, including the incomplete discussion of the evasive strategies adopted in press conferences as well as the constraints on their choices, the inadequate inclusion of the possible situations in which evasive strategies are employed. All these indicate the directions for the future researches.