Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokespersons’ Response Strategies For Conflict Talks

At the Chinese Foreign Ministry Regular Press Conference, the journalists often ask some sharp questions which may lead to conflicts. The spokespersons, as representatives of China, have to respond properly, which requires the spokesperson to adopt strategic expressions to help China keep a good image. Previous studies have broadly analyzed the response strategies in diplomatic language, but the detailed analysis of response strategies for conflict talk has not been covered. Besides, some theories about politeness involved in the studies of response strategies are mainly proposed by western scholars based on the western cultural background. In view of the relationship among politeness, pragmatic and culture proposed by Gu Yueguo, the theories can not explain specially the Chinese spokespersons’ response strategies. Therefore, the author of the present thesis explores the response strategies’ types, combinations and frequency and explains the reasons of strategy-choosing based on Gu Yueguo’ Politeness Principle, which helps us understand how the spokespersons deal with conflict talks.The data in this thesis mainly come from the question-response pairs between Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons and journalists at the Regular Press Conference from October 2013 to September 2014. According to the definition of conflict talk, 156 pairs containing conflict talks among the 1238 question-response pairs have been chosen. According to the researches on response strategies of Ran Yongping and Zhuang Meiying, the author classifies the strategies into direct strategies and indirect strategies. Direct strategies include Direct Negation, Negative Judgment, Using Imperative Sentence and Using Swear word, while indirect strategy consists of Implied Negation, Assertion, Focus-shifting, Using Rhetorical Question, Vague Deixis and Buck-passing.With further analysis, the author finds that the spokesperson choose strategies with some regularity.(1) The strategies can be used alone or combined in one response. There are three kinds of combination: combination of direct strategies, combination of indirect strategies, combination of direct strategy and indirect one. Each combination reveals its own features.(2) As to the distribution of number of strategies, there is a distinct difference on direct strategies, but that of indirect strategies is slightly different.According to Gu Yueguo’s Politeness Principle, the choice of indirect strategies, combination of direct strategy and indirect one and the different distributions of subordinate strategies are all responses based on the Chinese cultural background.