A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And American Communication Styles Based On The Theory Of Intercultural Communication

This dissertation contrasts the differences between China and America in communication styles and cultural patterns through analyzing speeches delivered by Chinese and American leaders in APEC.Most of previous studies of the speeches focused on communication strategies hidden behind ideology.Many researches also focused on comparison of cultural values in different nationalities by discussing various social phenomena.Different from previous studies on political discourses,this study pays more attention to language itself.By comparing language features of Chinese and English,the author tries to illustrate that the communication styles of Chinese and American leaders' are quite different and cultural factor are main causes for them.Ten speeches of Chinese and American leaders in APEC from 2008 to 2014 were chosen as samples The comparative analysis was conducted from different linguistic levels,such as lexical,semantic,syntactic and paragraph organization.Ten pairs of speech samples are collected from the official website of White House,China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Xinhuanet.com.All of the speeches share similar occasion or topics,which contribute to reliability and validity of samples for comparative analysis.Illustration method is used to show the basic difference combined with quantitative statistics to provide more specific explanation for some linguistic forms.The findings of the study are:Firstly,Chinese leader's communication styles tend to be impersonal,formal and indirect and American leader's communication styles tend to be personal,informal and direct.Secondly,American and Chinese leaders share almost the similarity in explicitness in their speeches.Thirdly,their use of language shows their different patterns of thought,cultural values and ideologies.The study is expected to provide reference for intercultural communication.