A Cirtical Contrastive Analysis Of The U.S. And Chinese Governmental Officials’ Speeches At UN Climate Summits

This thesis applies discursive strategies, including referential strategy andstrategies of argumentation, of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to a criticalstudy of the U.S. and Chinese governmental officials’ speeches at the climate summitsfrom2009to2011. It makes a contrast between the discursive strategies in the politicalspeeches and explores the reasons for their differences. In this way, the present study iscontributive to improve readers’ understanding of political speeches.DHA consists of five discursive strategies, but the present study mainly drawsupon two of them, that is, referential strategy and strategies of argumentation due to thefeatures of the data. Referential strategy refers to the categorization of socialparticipants as “in-group” members and “out-group” members. Strategies ofargumentation means that speakers use different topoi to justify certain positivesituations or describe some negative ones (Wodak,2001:73).The research data in this thesis include speeches by President Obama and PremierWen Jiabao at Copenhagen Climate Conference2009. Speeches of the chief negotiators(Xie Zhenhua, Su Wei and Stern) at Cancun and Durban talks are collected as data aswell. The author of this thesis selects18extracts and conducts a qualitative study inorder to sum up discursive strategies adopted by the two sides when they deal with thesame topics. Then the differences among the strategies will be summarized through acontrastive study. Further on, reasons leading to the differences will be expounded. Theresearch finds out that due to different attitudes and positions on climate change, thesediscourses by the two sides are different in the following aspects: the employment ofdifferent topoi, the criteria of group relation construction and the choice of addressforms.This study bears some practical significance. First, it helps to improve people’scritical language awareness and better their understanding of ideologies and potentialcommunicative intention in political speeches. Second, the present study is contributiveto the teaching of English writing. Teachers could integrate the discursive strategies of DHA to the teaching of writing so that students’ writing skills may be improved. Third,the present study offers some tentative revisions to the strategies of argumentation,which to some extent is innovative.