A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And American Top Leaders’ Speeches To University Students

The interpersonal meaning of discourse means that language is used to exchangemessage in discourse, to express the speaker’s identity, status, attitude and motivation, evento have an influence on people’s position and behavior from the perspective of functionallinguistics. Presently, the study on interpersonal of specific types of discourse is gettingmore and more popular both at home and aboard. However, there are comparatively a fewof the researches on interpersonal meaning of Chinese discourse and also a few contrastiveresearches on interpersonal meaning between the English and Chinese discourses. So it isof great importance to make a contrastive study on interpersonal meaning between Englishand Chinese discourses in that the realization of interpersonal meaning may vary withlanguage pattern, culture tradition and social factors.Since the political speech endows with the apparent characteristics on interpersonalfunction, This paper chooses four political speeches by Chinese and American top leaders respectively as the corpus of this thesis, including the speech by former Chinese nationalchairman Jiang Zemin in Harford University on1st November1997; the counterpartspeech by former American president Bill Clinton in Peking University on29th June1998;speech by Chinese national chairman Hu Jintao in Yale University on21st April2006; thecounterpart speech by American president Barak Obama in Fudan university on20thNovember2009. The four chosen speeches are the counterpart speeches. In the research,Contrastive analysis is made on the mood, modality, personal pronouns, and appraisalsystem combined with Five Culture Dimension by Hofstede.We have discovered the similarities and differences. The similarities lie that either inthe Chinese speeches or the English speeches different linguistic resources are accuratelyadopted by the addressers to realize the interpersonal meaning on their speeches. Theselinguistic resources include mood, modality and appraisal system. However, there is greatdifference in the realization of interpersonal meaning of English speeches and Chinesespeeches besides the similarities. Specifically, the similarities in the realization ofinterpersonal meaning are encapsulated as following:1) the more extensive use ofdeclarative mood;2) the probability has the highest frequency;3) the first personalpronouns occurred frequently;4) the positive judgment adopted by the addressers. Themain differences are:1) there are amount of modal verbs adopted by the addressers inEnglish political speeches; contrarily, there are less modal verbs in the Chinese speeches.2)In English speeches there are a great amount of personal pronouns whereas the Chinesespeeches have a few.3) As to the judgment, the English addressers present an appreciationto the capability of Chinese people; the Chinese addressers prefer to the tenacity ofChinese in their speeches.The differences and the similarities are explained combining with the Five Culturedimension. The contrastive study on interpersonal meaning of English and Chinesepolitical speeches can not only provide some constructive advice to guide practical Englishspeech, but also give some enlightenment in translation.