A Study Of Evasive Answers In China Foreign Ministry Spokespersons’ Regular Press Conference

Evasive answer is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the process of interactive communication and it plays an important role in the constructing and maintaining harmonious interpersonal relationship.Evasive answer occurs frequently in political meetings,especially in China Regular Press Conference.The Foreign Ministry Spokesperson adopts evasive answers to withhold information and skillfully obtain the optimal relevance.From the cognitive-pragmatic perspective,this paper explores strategies,pragmatic functions and realization of spokespersons’ evasive answers at the regular press conferences.It also studies how evasive answers are realized to achieve the optimal relevance under Cooperative Principle.The cognitive-pragmatic perspective of this thesis mainly refers to Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and Grice’s cooperative principle.Optimal relevance is used to explain the generative mechanism of evasive answers.The violation of the cooperative principle is used to analyze the conversational implicature caused by evasive answers.Theoretically speaking,the combination of the two theories broadens the research field of evasive answers and enriches the researching perspective.It also verifies the feasibility of Sperber and Wilson’s theory on the analysis of evasive answers.On the practical side,the present research will help cultivate and improve language users’ evasive consciousness and help us have a better understanding of evasive answers.All the data in this thesis is collected on the official website of PRC Foreign Ministry(http://www.fmprc.gov.cn)and ranged from June 2014 to December 2016 with 5485 words.These data are in the form of transcripts.The spokespersons involved in the study are Hong Lei,Hua Chunying,Lu Kang and Geng Shuang.The thesis mainly adopts qualitative method to discuss their evasive answers at the Regular Press Conference.The study indicates that China Foreign Ministry spokespersons use various evasive answers for many reasons at regular press conference.They adopt evasive answers to achieve the functions of withholding information,realizing face-saving,maintaining harmony and avoiding conflicts.Furthermore,evasive answers produce conversational implicature by the violation of cooperative principle in order to achieve the optimal relevance.