Contrastive Analysis And Cultural Interpretation Of Chinese And American Political Discourse Based On Ideational Function

As the official government documents,State of the Union Address or Report on the Work of the Government is delivered by the national government spokesman every year to summarize the work achievements of the government in the past year and to deploy the work plans of the government in the upcoming year,so as to make guidance and commitment to the people.Thus,in the speech,speakers employ different language strategies to express their opinions and to achieve the speech purpose.It is not only of guiding significance domestically but also is an important way for other countries to understand the development policies and trends of the country.The study of these political discourse is of great value.As an effective instrument in discourse analysis,Halliday's systemic functional grammar takes the functions of language as starting point,and holds that as a product of human social activities and a tool of social communication,language has three metafunctions,namely the ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.As a way of expressing people's experiences in the real world and the inner world,ideational function is mainly realized through transitivity system and voice system,and is widely used in the field of discourse analysis to explore the speaker's ‘meaning potential'.Based on the existing literature,many researchers have applied this theory to analyze different kinds of discourse.Most of them paid much attention to the transitivity system,and studies on voice system were seldom available.Besides,few researchers have made a contrastive analysis of two political discourse to explore the linguistic features of the discourse.Thus,based on the ideational function in Halliday's systemic functional grammar,the present study chooses two highly corresponding political discourse,State of the Union Address of America and Report on the Work of the Government of China in the same year2018,as the research corpus.Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis methods,the thesis tries to make a contrastive analysis of the different ways ideational function is realized in the two discourse,that is,to analyze the two speakers' linguistic features in terms of transitivity system and voice system.Based on the close relations between language and culture,after analyzing the distribution similarities and differences of the two systems in the two political discourse,the study seeks to make a cultural interpretation of the linguistic differences based on Hofstede's and Hall's culture comparison taxonomies,and to explore thepossible cultural factors which influence the speakers' language use,so as to reveal the relations between different language structures and the cultural factors behind them.It is an application of functional grammar theory in the field of contrastive discourse analysis,which has practical significance for a deeper understanding of Chinese and American political discourse.The following are the research questions of the present study:(1)What are the distribution features of transitive system and voice system in SUA of America and RWG of China respectively?(2)What are the distribution similarities and differences in terms of the two systems in the two discourse?(3)What are the possible cultural factors contributing to the linguistic features of the two discourse?The study shows that the transitive processes,participants and voice types are distributed in the two political discourse with both similarities and differences.To be more specific,material process is most frequently used in both the two discourse,while the proportion of mental process in the American discourse is obviously higher than that in the Chinese discourse.As to the participants,although the participant type ‘we' and its variant forms are in the dominant place in both discourse,participant type ‘I' and its variant forms are used more frequently in SUA than in RWG.As far as the voice system is concerned,active voice is widely used in both of the two discourse,but the proportion of it in RWG is higher than in RWG and more passive voice clauses are used in SUA.The present study indicates that language and culture are closely interrelated,and the differences of Chinese and American cultural patterns may lead to the differences of the two speakers' language use.The possible cultural factors influencing the speakers' language use mainly include high-context and low context,individualism and collectivism,and world views.