First Person Pronouns In Political Speeches By American And Chinese Leaders: A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis

The years since the early1980s have witnessed a growing interest in the area ofpolitical discourse, with the purpose of seeking out the ways in which language choice ismanipulated for specific political effect. While studies emerging from across the globehave approached the genre from a variety of perspectives—critical, descriptive,psychological, social and linguistic, Chinese political discourse has remained almostuntouched.The present thesis aims to compare the use of first person pronouns in Chinese andAmerican political discourse by examining40public speech samples delivered by toppolitical leaders. The results show significant cross-cultural variations between twogroups of speeches regarding the use of first person pronouns. On the one hand,American samples contain more than three times as many first person pronouns as theChinese corpus. On the other hand, the plural forms of the pronoun are used much morefrequently in the Chinese corpus. As for inclusive, exclusive and national we, nosignificant variations were found between two groups of samples. The differences areexplained in terms of cultural type, leadership of government, and the formality ofspeech.The research is expected to be contributed to contrastive study between Chinesepolitical discourse and American political discourse and help speech writers andtranslators to be more cross-culturally conscious.