A Comparative Study Of Stylistic Features Of Chinese And American Political Leaders’ Speeches

Political speech is an important medium for politicians to publicize their viewpoints and to communicate with the public. People’s Republic of China is the largest developing country and the United States of America is the largest developed country. So the political speeches by the leaders of the two countries are influential not only within the border of the two countries, but also around the world. The political speeches by American leaders have been studied by linguists from various perspectives. And with the rising of Chinese international status, more and more attention is paid to the political speeches delivered by Chinese leaders. But the comparative study of the stylistic features of Chinese political speeches with those of other countries, especially with American political speeches, is not as much. The comparative study of the Chinese and American political speeches not only help us understand the information transmitted through the speeches, but also help us learn the underlying cultural elements.This paper aims to compare the stylistic features of speeches delivered by Chinese and American political leaders. The analytical framework of this research is designed on the basis of theories of functional stylistics. The comparative study is divided into global and local analyses. The global analysis focuses on the extra-linguistic elements of the two speeches, including the context of culture and context of situation. The context of culture centers on the cultural origins and political systems of the two countries; and the context of situation mainly involves the analysis of the three configurations that define "register", i.e. field, tenor, and mode. The local analysis centers on the linguistic features of the two speeches at the textual, grammatical, and lexical levels. The research at textual level discusses the cohesive mechanisms of the two speeches; the analysis at grammatical level consists of the analyses of transitivity system, mood and modality, as well as theme and rheme; and the analysis at lexical level centers on the prominence of lexical use in the speeches.In order to verify the effectiveness of the analytical framework, this paper selects two political speeches delivered to the youth of the host countries as the corpus. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted in the study. The analytical procedure is presented as follow. First, the stylistic features of each speech at certain analytical level are described; and then the features are compared on the basis of relevant statistics; and at last, the similarities and differences of these features as well as the reasons for the similarities and differences are analyzed.This paper includes six parts. The first part is the general introduction to the thesis which includes the research background, research purpose and significance, research methodology, and research layout. Chapter One is the literature review, which centers on the preceding research on political speeches, comparative linguistic studies, and functional stylistic research. Chapter Two is the theoretical framework, which mainly includes the theoretical basis and analytical framework of the research. Chapter Three is the comparative study of the two texts at global level, covering the context of culture and the context of situation of the involved texts. Chapter Four is the comparative study of the two texts at local level. The chosen texts will be analyzed at the textual, grammatical, and lexical levels. The last part is the conclusion, providing major findings and limitations of the research, and the suggestions for the further research.