An Analysis Of Response Strategies Adopted By Spokespersons In Chinese Foreign Ministry's Regular Press Conference From The Principle Of Goal-direction

The spokesperson not only needs to release the information through the journalists. At the same time, he also needs to take the national interests such as to protect the state secrets into consideration. The language of the spokesperson is highly strategic. A number of studies on the Press Conference from the aspect of linguistics have mainly devoted to the response strategies especially based on pragmatic principles, such as Co-operative Principle, the Politeness Principle and the Relevance Principle. But these studies fail to explain the distribution of the response strategies adopted by the spokesperson, especially response strategies to sensitive and sharp questions in goal-conflicting situations. Therefore, the thesis attempts to analyze the response strategies adopted by the spokesperson deeply and comprehensively from the aspect of goals pragmatically.Based on the Principle of Goal-direction and its theoretical framework, the author makes a tentative analysis of the data about the Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's Regular Press Conferences which include the whole year of 2014. Based on the elaborative analysis of the data, firstly, the goal interaction types of the journalist and the spokesperson are analyzed. Then the response strategies adopted by the spokesperson in different goal relations are elaborated, especially strategies adopted in goal-conflicting situations. The research results show that the goal interaction types between the spokesperson and the journalist are the goal-adopted interaction, goal-put-aside interaction, goal-ignored interaction and goal-refused interaction which accounts for 72%,10%,14% and 4% respectively. In goal-convergent relation, the response strategies adopted by the spokesperson are cooperating directly and cooperating indirectly which accounts for 41% and 59% individually. While in goal-conflicting relation, the strategies of avoiding directly (14%) and avoiding indirectly (86%) are adopted. Under the strategy of avoiding indirectly, there are switching the topic, vague responses and "Ti piu qiu" strategy which takes up 58%,37% and 5%. The thesis gives an explanation of the most frequent response strategy (switching the topic).The thesis enriches the Principle of Goal-direction in the field of Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's Regular Press Conferences which offers a new perspective to study the response strategies adopted by the spokesperson. Besides, it is not only conducive in providing suggestions and references for the spokesperson in Regular Press Conferences to give responses to the journalist's questions, but also helpful to the spokesperson in all levels of the government to respond to the questions of the journalist.