A Contrastive Study Of Interactional Metadiscourse In The Realization Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And American Political Speeches

As an important part of a discourse,interactional metadiscourse can be used for interpersonal meaning realization from the functional perspective.Interactional metadiscourse is focused on stance expression of the speaker as well as the interaction with the hearers.Interactional metadiscourse will contribute to helping the audience to understand the discourse content in a better way.Consequently,the study on interactional metadiscourse has always been the research emphasis of linguistic scholars and it deserves deeper exploration.According to existing studies,most of them are emphasized on the monolingual study of interactional metadiscourse,but contrastive study in different languages is not very common.In addition,previous studies have always been concentrated on the academic genre analysis,ignoring the new media resources such as political speech discourses.Nowadays we are in an environment where political situation is complex,so political discourse,which is the carrier of political activities,needs to be paid more attention.Political speeches have broad influence,and the speakers of political speeches always focus on the interactive communication with the listeners.As a result,interactional metadiscourse will be used more commonly,which will provide rich materials for this research.Considering all the factors mentioned above,this paper is going to discuss about the following contents.Firstly,it is about the differences of interactional metadiscourse use in Chinese and American political speeches.Secondly it is the effect that the differences have on the interpersonal meaning realization.Finally it will conclude the possible factors that cause the differences of interactional metadiscourse use.In order to guarantee that the study is based on efficient data,this paper self-built a corpus that is composed of 60 Chinese and American political speeches,totaling 142,986 words.Among these words,there are 81,585 Chinese words and 61,401 English words.Identification of five subtypes of interactional metadiscourse has been finished on the basis of specific linguistic contexts.In addition,the thesis has also taken lists of interactional metadiscourse markers of political discourse in previous studies into consideration and has summarized a new list after analysis.Based on data,the analytical result shows that self-mention and engagement markers are the two most frequently used devices in Chinese and American political speeches,which implies that speakers in both countries attach importance to the self-presence and have the will to interact with the audience.When it comes to the differences,there are more hedges,self-mentions and engagement markers used in American political speeches than in Chinese among the same number of words.Also,there are more attitude markers and boosters used in Chinese political speeches than in American speeches.According to the analysis of SPSS 17.0.0,degree of difference in interactional metadiscourse use varies among five interactional metadiscourse markers.In order of markers with obvious significance in using frequency,it goes boosters,hedges,attitude markers and self-mentions.Engagement markers do not have a significant difference in frequency.According to Hyland's model of interaction,in political speeches these differences have an effect on interpersonal meaning realization in two aspects,which are stance and engagement.Three important components of stance are evidentiality,presence and affect.Two essential components of engagement are satisfying the requirement of being included in the discourse by the audience and positioning audience with literary skill in communication.Possible influencing factors include culture factor,uncertainty avoidance factor and the term orientation factor.Through the contrastive study,this paper has concluded the interactional metadiscourse differences and the corresponding interpersonal effect as well as influencing factors,whose aim is to provide a better perspective for future interactional metadiscourse study.At the same time,the analytical result of the study can also be applied in translation area of political discourse,making the translators better understand interactional metadiscourse meaning under various cultural contexts.Consequently,it can improve the translation quality of political discourses.