Public Speeches By Chinese And American Political Leaders:a Genre Analysis Perspective

Within the framework of genre analysis,this thesis intends to conduct a contrastive research between four public speeches delivered by Chinese political leaders in American universities and five public speeches delivered by American political leaders in Chinese universities,aiming at exploring what moves and steps or strategies are employed by political leaders in two corpora to achieve their communicative purposes,whether there exist similarities and differences among them and what are the possible reasons behind.Firstly,the moves and strategies in two corpora are identified on the basis of the communicative purposes.Then,the number and percentage of the words in every move and strategy in the speeches are calculated so as to probe into the similarities and differences of two corpora.The findings reveal that two corpora exhibit similarities in that both include four obligatory moves and the specific strategies under every move display a high frequency of resemblance.Moreover,a larger proportion of words are distributed in Move 3 Presenting the speech in both corpora.And Move 3 Strategy 4 and Strategy 5 occur in a recursive way.However,differences emerge in that political leaders from two countries lay different emphases in their speeches.For instance,Chinese political leaders tend to put more emphasis on Move 3 Strategy 1 Advocating the political standpoints or policies of the country while American political leaders use more words in Move 3 Strategy 4 Specifying challenges for countries.In addition,some strategies only appear in one corpus such as Move 1 Strategy 2 and Move 3 Strategy 3 in the speeches by American political leaders.And even in the same move or strategy the speakers may choose different manners to realize their communicative purposes,which can be explained in terms of collectivism vs.individualism,emphasis on tradition vs.indifference to tradition,being implicit vs.being explicit and formality vs.informality.It is of significance to note the manifestation of political leaders' intercultural communication awareness in the speeches as well.By analyzing the macro-structure of two corpora and comparing the similarities and differences in moves and strategies,the present study is expected to provide some suggestions to speech writing and intercultural communication.