A Pragmatic Study On Personal Pronoun Shifts In Consecutive Interpreting Of Political Settings

Personal pronouns(hereinafter referred as PP)are one of the most common but integral word class in language.Previous studies on this topic tend to analyze them from the perspective of syntax,or focus on contrastive studies between Chinese and English,less concentrating on interpreting studies.Even in the field of interpreting,the majority of research are about usage features and interpreting strategies of personal pronouns under different working models,only few about personal pronoun shifts(hereinafter referred as PPS).But these research have laid a solid foundation for the present study after all.Aiming to find reasons causing the phenomenon of PPS in CI,the author transcribed the press conference for the Fourth Session of the 12 th National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress and marked all PPS occurring in the transcription with the help of Microsoft Word.As people's choice of PP can indicate their stance,the shift from speaker's PP to the interpreter's PP reveals the shift of the interpreter's alignment.Since PPS is relevant to the interpreter's psychological activity,Communication Accommodation Theory(hereinafter referred as CAT),which combines knowledge of psychology with communication,was introduced to guide this research.Based on two important accommodation process convergence and divergence,the author thus applied pragmatic empathy and pragmatic de-empathy to offer explanations to PPS.Meanwhile,the research also displayed what types of personal pronoun shifts exist in consecutive interpreting(hereinafter referred as CI)and what are their distribution as well as summarized their characteristics.After the analysis,the research found that PPS mostly occurred in the first PP and the third PP.Besides,interpreters are more than just simply a passive conduit of language.They will sometimes change the speaker's choice of PP in their rendition for the purpose of enlarging or shortening distance between the addresser and the addressee.Their emotional change,or in other words,their alignment with the addresser,the addressee or a third party can directly influence the process and performance of the interaction.