A Comparative Discourse Analysis On New Year Addresses From Chinese And British National Leaders

Both the Chinese President and the British Queen deliver New Year Addresses to the people of the country each year.The speeches from Chinese and British national leaders represent the most elaborate languages and cultures of the two countries,which are good windows for understanding Chinese and Western cultures and good materials for language learning and language research.Relevant research has carried out genre analysis on business discourse,news discourse and other types of discourses from the macro and micro dimensions,in order to discover the structural characteristics and language characteristics,thereby revealing the commonality and individuality of such discourses.However,there is very little research on the genre of New Year Addresses.This thesis builds a small corpus,containing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s New Year Addresses since he took office in 2013 and British Queen Elizabeth’s New Year Addresses in the same period.Based on genre theories such as Bhatia and Swales’ s move analysis and Halliday’s register analysis,this thesis compares the samples of Chinese and English New Year Addresses in 2021,and the move structure and language characteristics are summarized.The results of sample analysis are further verified by quantitative analysis of the corpus.Finally,this thesis compares Chinese President Xi’s and British Queen’s New Year Addresses,and explores the reasons for the similarities and differences.The result shows that both Chinese and British national leaders’ New Year Addresses display common generic structure characteristics,with ten steps in four moves.Specifically,Move 1(Opening words)is initiated with a background introduction or greeting and congratulation;Move 2(Reviewing the Past Year)is pushed by describing the environment,summarizing the achievements and expressing the gratitude;Move 3(Looking into the future)is propelled with national strategies,goals and encouragement;Move 4(Concluding the speech)is ended with two steps of blessing and gratitude.At the same time,due to the cultural differences between China and the UK,there are significant differences in the choice of topics,the use of personal pronouns,and the expression of conceptual and interpersonal meanings in Chinese and British national leaders’ New Year Addresses,presenting their own unique language styles.