| 1. Research SubjectThis research focuses on the analysis of governmental discourse, which is defined as formally expressed viewpoints of national leaders, official spokespersons or documents that are officially delivered and published. As a class of genres defined by a social domain, namely that of people who govern, governmental discourse is a form of institutional discourse produced by the speaker in her professional role of a government official and in an institutional setting.A government's discourse plays a crucial role in expressing political opinions, promoting political philosophy, influencing public opinion and building public mentality. It should therefore be not only accurately and clearly expressed but also understood correctly and as fully as possible. The author believes that any errors in the transmitting and understanding of a government's discourse can lead to far more serious consequences than those of common people's discourse. Consequently, governmental discourse deserves our special attention and significantly more research than it has hitherto received.As the largest developing country and the largest developed country in the world, respectively, the People's Republic of China and the United States of America are regarded by many other nations and also by their own citizens as two world powers. From the recent visit of our Chairman Hu Jintao to the United States, we have seen that eyes in virtually every corner of the world are upon these two nations, their top political leaders and their discourses. The two nations formally established diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979, and the thirty-two subsequent years have witnessed cycles of ebb and flow in their official relationship. It has become the most important bilateral one in the world. That fact is the principal reason underlying the choice of Chinese and American governmental discourses as the research subject of this thesis.There are both similarities in and differences between Chinese and American governmental discourses, but the present study is aimed at exploring their differences with the main focus on how their discourses are organized and words are chosen to reflect ideological values and political interest. As the record of Sino-US relation contains numerous examples of miscommunication and misunderstanding, the author has compiled a wealth of evidence to make the following hypothesis: The linguistic differences between Chinese and American governmental discourses reflect their cultural differences and different prevailing ideologies, and the discourse strategies they adopt to achieve their own goals are strongly influenced by their cultural traditions. Their discourses and strategies must first of all serve their national interests. Furthermore, when their ideologies conflict with their national interests, the former usually yields to the latter.Based on the above hypotheses, the present study intends to analyze both the linguistic differences and the deep cultural and ideological causes behind the words between Chinese and American governmental discourse. Specifically, it attempts to answer the following questions: What special features does governmental discourse have in general and what differences are there in the features between Chinese and American governmental discourse? What linguistic differences exist in their discourses at such levels as those of lexicon, syntax, pragmatics and discourse, and what cultural and ideological differences are reflected behind them? What discourse strategies are adopted in their governmental discourses to serve their own national interests, and how? Are the different strategies also influenced by their different cultural traditions and ways of thinking? What insights can be drawn from the comparative analysis of the two governmental discourses so as to improve the effectiveness of our governmental discourse strategies?As was pointed out in "A Guide to the National Social Science Foundation of China" (2006)"On the whole, a large number of studies are simply reports of Western scholarly literature and lack originality. There is much more research on translation, but relatively little on language comparison. In the future, we should enhance the study on both theory and practice, laying more emphasis on comparative study of languages as well as on theoretical and practical research on foreign language teaching.…On the basis of fully exploring Chinese language resources, we should strengthen the establishment of disciplines, integrating research strength, and greatly promoting synergy of disciplines and interdisciplinary research."The present research is an attempt in following this guide by combining theory with practice, making use of our own language resources and comparing Chinese and American governmental discourses from a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective. By incorporating approaches of political science, international relations and linguistics, new insights can be gained.2. Research SignificanceCurrently, cultural discourse analysis in the academic world encompasses mainly ideological discourse analysis, historical analysis, psychological analysis, pragmatic analysis, and cross-cultural communication analysis. However, nearly all forms of discourse analysis center around "meaning", with the goal of extracting from the discourse its signified meaning. Among them, critical discourse analysis (CDA) has proven to be a very useful tool for analyzing political discourse, with the main focus on how discourse arises from ideology and how inequalities in political power are generated.While studies related to Sino-America bilateral relation have long been carried out mainly by scholars in the fields of diplomacy, international politics, journalism and mass communications, linguistic scholars have not got involved in them seriously enough. While political discourse analysis has developed rapidly in recent years in several parts of the world, studies within China are still in their infancy, having yielded relatively few articles published in various academic journals. The present author has concluded from an investigation of the Chinese scholarly literature on linguistic research related to the present one that its inadequacy can be attributed to three general categories of shortcomings: First, in terms of their research backgrounds, most studies have been based on a single country's culture rather than cross-cultural comparisons. Secondly, with regard to research subjects, the majority of studies have focused on mass media discourse, while relatively few studies of official and political discourse have been undertaken. Moreover, many have dealt with discourse itself, while too few study language users; many studies are of domestic discourse, but very few are of international discourse. Finally, when one turns to research methodology, one discovers that studies have often been based on single texts, but few have employed corpuses. Critical discourse studies are many, but non-critical discourse studies. are few. Similarly, qualitative analyses are numerous, but few have combined qualitative studies with quantitative ones.Redressing aspects of these imbalances in existing research, the present investigation is a comparative study of governmental discourse in the People's Republic of China and the United States of America. It tries to combine theoretical and applied research, conventional and new approaches, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. Consequently, this study has theoretical significance. In practical terms, an understanding of the cultural meaning behind the words investigated will not only help to identify the nature of a country's governmental discourse but can also benefit the successful use of discourse strategies to promote international exchanges and enhance soft power. It is hoped that this research will help people to reach accurate understandings of both the Chinese and American governments' discourse, reduce misunderstandings, enhance the effectiveness of communication, and improve the application of communication strategies.3. Research MethodologyThe very subject of this comparative governmental discourse study has determined the nature of its interdisciplinary, multi-angled and integrated research methods. It deals with political cognition, with discourse structures and with the socio-political context in which such cognitions and discourses have their meanings and functions. Therefore, this study takes social constructivism as its cognitive basis, critical discourse analysis as its methodological basis, and English-Chinese comparison and corpus-based research as its intersect research perspectives. It tries to combine these different strands of research by emphasizing cross-language and cross-cultural comparative studies on the one hand and highlighting governmental discourse, international discourse, idiosyncrasies of participants in politics, and social background factors on the other hand.The proposition is that political behavior is a universal human attribute. All governmental discourse manifests power and control, irrespective of culture or ideological differences. Governmental discourse takes place within a system. Fundamental structures are who talks (is allowed to talk), to whom, about what, when and where. Therefore, there are some grounds for thinking that governmental discourse can be compared across cultures, or at least that there are grounds for making the attempt.The data for research comes from important lectures, announcements, speeches, and documents given formally or released publicly by governmental institutions, high-level political leaders, or government speakers in both oral and written forms. The data for comparison are consistent in register and genre, such as speeches given by Chinese Chairman and American president on important occasions, Chinese and American spokespersons'answers to journalist's questions at the same conferences, and Chinese and American white papers about similar topics. The sources from which the data are collected include government documents, newspaper and magazines, the Internet and special databases.Chinese and American governmental discourses cover a wide range of themes and involve politics, economics, military affairs and diplomacy. The topics vary from human rights, counter-terrorism and the Tibet issue to questions concerning the market economy, trade conflicts, monetary policy, environmental protection, and exchanges of military personnel. This frame is so wide and complex that the present thesis can only address some of these themes with the focus of current issues of more importance to both sides.Figure 1 illustrates structure of governmental discourse, which includes the research theme, source and form. Having limited governmental discourse to the institutionally bound documents and speeches of people who govern, our next task is to describe the genres that belong to that domain. "Register" is important in Halliday's systemic linguistics because it is seen as the linguistic consequences of interacting aspects of context. A series of linguistic features related to language use constitutes a certain "register", which includes field, mode and tenor. "Field" refers to the topics and actions which language is used to express. "Tenor" denotes the language users, their relationships to each other, and their purposes. "Mode" refers to the channel through which communication is carried out (Thompson, 1984: 94). Martin (1992: 496) further developed Halliday's theory by adding two more contextual variables, namely genre and ideology (see Fig. 2). From the above figure, we can understand that the outer rings generally influence overall interpretation more than the inner ones. So ideology takes the leading position in governmental discourse analysis. The generic description of governmental discourse should not only take place at the levels of text, but also at the level of context. A study of topics, lexical styles, pragmatic and rhetorical features of a governmental discourse reveal many social and especially political functions of such discourse. Therefore, in the present study, both text levels such as lexicon, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, discourse and rhetoric and context levels such as politics, society and culture are analyzed.4. Structure of the ThesisThe structure of the present thesis follows a conventional pattern. Its seven chapters are systematically arranged in four parts. They are the introduction (Chapter 1), the review of previous scholarly literature (Chapter 2), the textual analysis(Chapter 3 to 5), and the conclusion and implication(Chapter 6 and 7). Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the motivation for and the purpose of conducting this study. It also includes definitions of the key terms and concepts, describes the research subjects and methodology, indicates the potential significance of this study and outlines the structural arrangement of the thesis.Chapter 2 is devoted to a review of previous research related to the present multi-dimensional study of governmental discourse, social constructivism, critical discourse analysis, English-Chinese comparison and corpus-based research, which collectively provides both the theoretical and methodological base for the present study. This chapter reviews these related theories in terms of their backgrounds, basic assumptions, and current state of arts both home and abroad,as well as its relevance to the present study.Social constructionism is epistemologically oriented. While it emphasizes social construction and social process in knowledge creating, it also puts constructive function of language and discourse in a paramount position. Discourse in social constructionism is considered as one moment of social practice and the product of social interaction. Constructivism explores foreign policy by linking norms and identity changes at both the national and international levels. This paradigm shift provides us with a new framework which sheds light on an understanding of governmental discourse analysis.Critical discourse analysis (CDA), according to Ruth Wodak (1989:12) is"an interdisciplinary approach to language study with a critical point of view for the purpose of studying language behavior in natural speech situations of social relevance"The underlying presupposition of CDA was that linguistic choices relate to ideological positioning (Bayley, 2004:28). It starts from"the perception of discourse as an element of social practices"(Fairclough, 2003:3), which constitutes other elements as well as being shaped by them. CDA highlights the linguistic and discursive nature of social relations of power in contemporary societies. Discourse, ideology and power are three cornerstones of CDA (Weiss and Wodak, 2003:11). The subjects or topics under discussion differ for the variety of researchers who apply CDA in their studies. Among them, gender issues, racism issues, identity issues, media discourse, political discourse, organizational discourse are becoming prominent. "Studies in CDA are multifarious, derived from quite different theoretical backgrounds and are oriented towards very different data and methodologies"(Weiss & Wodak, 2003:12). Also, such terms as"discourse","ideology"and"power"are used very differently by different researchers and in different academic cultures.From the above brief review, the author finds that CDA is a most appropriate approach to governmental discourse analysis and it will be enriched by comparative methods and corpus linguistics. Comparative study helps to reveal the cultural differences between Chinese and American governmental discourses, while corpus linguistics with the use of Oxford WordSmith Tools can help reduce the researcher's bias. Both qualitative study of specific discourses and quantitative study based on the discourse corpora are adopted in the following chapters.Chapter 3, 4 and 5 constitute the most important parts of this thesis, as they deal with comparison and detailed analysis of the three important types of governmental discourse between the two states, namely top leaders'speeches, spokespersons'answers to journalists'questions, and state white papers. The data in each chapter are chosen as representative and analyzed from different linguistic perspectives according to their features and styles, such as lexicon, semantics, cyntax, pragmatics, discourse and rhetoric, etc. in a hope to find out their cultural and ideological differences behind their linguistic differences.Chapter 3 is a comparative analysis of top leaders'speeches from the perspective of word choices, quotations, syntaxical and discourse structures. It includes three comparative analyses: The first is a corpus-based keyword analysis to examine both consistency and changes in American and Chinese politics as reflected in common and unique most-used words in American presidential inaugural addresses and reports delivered by Chinese top leaders at the National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The second explores the similarities and differences in their use of quotations in Chinese and American top leaders'speeches in intercultural contexts. The third is a comparative analysis of speeches delivered by U.S. president George W. Bush and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao at similar occasions. These analyses all focus on linguistic realization of different cultural values and ideologies in top leaders' speeches.Chapter 4 investigates various pragmatic strategies employed by both Chinese and American spokespersons in their routine press conferences held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and the United States Department of State. Among various strategies that are usually adopted to sidestep challenging questions from journalists,. this chapter compares their similarities and differences in the use of evasion, euphemisms, metaphors, pronouns, and indirect speech acts. Considering the conversational styles of the data, some pragmatic theories and principles are used in the comparison and analysis of the pragmatic strategies adopted by both Chinese and American spokespersons.Chapter 5 turns to government documents which are more serious and formal with certain fixed formats. Chinese and American state white papers on human rights and national defense are mainly chosen for the samples. They are analyzed under the frames of Fairclough's three dimensions (text, discursive practice and social practice) in the former and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function) in the latter.The above analysis of the three types of Chinese and American governmental discourse also shows the importance of foreign publicity for a government to achieve its goals. Proper translation of governmental discourse is of vital importance to foreign publicity of the People's Republic of China. Therefore, Chapter 6 turns to the discussion of translation efficiency of Chinese governmental discourse. First, in the light of Skopostheorie, which redefines the concept of translation as a purpose-guiding activity, the author explains why translation efficiency should be the final goal and evaluation of governmental discourse translation. Then the author reports her survey of the efficiency of existing translations of Chinese official slogans through questionnaires circulated among and follow-up interviews of English native speakers. Finally, culturally loaded meanings of words and foreignization translation devices are emphasized in the discussion of translation strategies, and suggestions for improving the efficiency in translating Chinese governmental discourse are raised.Chapter 7 concludes this thesis with a summary of the findings and their contribution to knowledge, a discussion of possible implications and comments on appropriate directions in which future research might proceed in order to extend further the frontier of scholarly knowledge about the topic.5. Research findings and implicationsThe result of the comparative study on Chinese and American governmental discourse, whether of oral or written, and dealing with various topics in the fields of politics, economics, military or diplomacy, have all supported the author's hypothesis that the linguistic differences between Chinese and American governmental discourses reflect their cultural differences and different prevailing ideologies, and the discourse strategies they adopt to serve their own national interests are strongly influenced by their cultural traditions.The analysis of the top leaders'speeches, spokespersons'discourse and state white papers has clearly shown that governmental discourse has the following features in general: Governmental discourse has strong political purposes, embodies rich cultural connotations, adopts serious and formal formats, and contains various pragmatic strategies.The present comparative study of Chinese and American governmental discourse has yielded the following general findings:First, governmental discourse constructs national identity. Discourse represents a person's image, and the same is true with governmental discourse. The research shows that significantly different cultural characteristics, national role positioning and mindsets reflected in Chinese and American governmental discourse. For example, the American formulations of human rights embody the ideals of historical"American Exceptionalism", the expansion of the"American Dream"in diplomatic policies and the national role as"the Leader of the World". By contrast, Chinese views of human rights reflect the historical view of the Chinese defending themselves against foreign invasions and the position of China as a responsible great nation in the Third World standing against hegemonism.Second, governmental discourse unquestionably embodies ideology. Discourse analysis cannot be carried much further if it denies the existence of ideology. Language constructs the rules, the rules shape the context, the context decides the meaning and meaning constraints the behavior. Language plays an important role in this process.By studying how language mediates and represents the world from different view points, CDA has demonstrated that all linguistic usage denotes ideological positions. Ideology is understood here as a value-neutral concept, referring to any system of norms, values, and beliefs. It is closely related to identity as mentioned above, just as Fairclough and Wodak (1997:276) point out:"It is useful to think of ideology as a process which articulates together particular representations of reality, and particular constructions of identity, especially of the collective identities of groups and communities."The present study clearly reveals that both Chinese and American governmental discourses are determined by the nature of their respective governments and have strong ideological components. For example, it has been found from the comparative study of intertextuality in speeches of US-Sino top leaders that they differ greatly with regard to original creators and content of intertextuality. The intertextuality in the Chinese political speeches are more balanced in their employment of Chinese and foreign intertextuality and large number of references to traditional culture is employed, demonstrating a culturally big nation image, while intertextuality on the American side is more of US political origin, and there exists negative employment, indicating a political superpower image.Third, governmental discourse represents national interest. However, the interaction between national interest and ideology of political leaders is always accumulative. It may sometimes be the case that basic principles of professional ideologies clash with national interests. In such instances, national interests usually take first place in governmental discourse. The author employed a corpus-based keyword analysis to examine ten representative American presidents' inaugural addresses. The study reveals that the United States has evinced an extraordinary and unrivaled ability to maintain its political tradition and stability over 44 presidencies for more than 200 years. At the same time, the evolution of their political ideas and policies in response to shifting challenges of the times is also revealed. The same is true in the case of the eleven reports delivered by Chinese top leaders at the National Congress of the Communist Party of China since 1945. The result based on the corpus-based keyword analysis clearly shows the development of Chinese government and the ability to maintain its political stance and adapting to the changing society. Such words as"development"and"reform"remain among the most frequent keywords ever since their first appearance in the reports in the 80's. The emphases on these words in both governments'discourses are fitst of all from the perspective of their own national interests.Fourth, governmental discourse is deeply influenced by traditional cultural values. Many deeply rooted factors affect the Chinese and American discourse in question. They include not only national, geographical, environmental and national resources, but also the two countries' political systems, political concepts, religious beliefs and practices, political culture, and so on. Among all of those elements, traditional cultural values have an especially strong influence on the governmental discourse of both countries. Through analyzing speeches delivered by US president George W. Bush and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao on similar topics or occasions, it was found that the sentences in the Chinese president's speeches show the tendency for bamboo-like topic-oriented structure while the sentences in the US president's speeches show the tendency for tree-like subject-oriented structure. The Chinese president's speeches are characterized by formality of language, inductive rhetorical pattern and face politeness strategy of independence, while the US president's speeches are characterized by informality of language, deductive rhetorical pattern and face politeness strategy of involvement. In terms of emotive devices, they share some similarities with both utilizing the devices of classification and complexity of syntax, but also differences, with the Chinese ones utilizing abundant use of adjectives and English ones utilizing passivization. Chinese culture is characterized by strict hierarchy, high power distance index and Chinese people are more likely to think in an inductive way. By contrast, American culture is characterized by loose hierarchy and low power distance index, and American people are more likely to think deductively. Fifth, strategies utilization is an important tool to enhance the effectiveness of governmental discourse. Governmental discourse in question embodies in most cases political rhetoric. Rhetoric is the study of effective thinking, writing and speaking strategies (Leech, 1983:52). Rhetorical strategy is a focused thinking strategy which can help writers or speakers to develop their ideas and organize them coherently. Both China and America adopt various pragmatic strategies in their discourses to achieve their communicative goals. Among the often used rhetorical devices are evasive strategies, hedges, vague words, metaphors, and euphemism, etc. Many differences of the strategic utilization have been found from the present comparative study between Chinese and American discourse. In addition to the differences in evasive strategies mentioned earlier, spokespersons for both countries often use various other rhetorical strategies differently at their routine press conferences, such as hedges and vague words. The author investigated evasion strategies employed by both Chinese and American spokespersons in their routine press conferences held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and the United States Department of State to sidestep challenging questions from journalists regarding the North Korean Nuclear Issue during a four month period in 2006. The findings indicated that American spokespersons used an overt evasion strategy more often, while Chinese spokespersons adopted a covert evasion strategy more frequently. The differences in evasion strategies used by Chinese and American spokespersons were found to lie in their different verbal styles typical of their respective national characteristics in protecting different national interests.Last but not least, acceptability is an important condition to increase the effectiveness of translation of governmental discourse. Proper translation of Chinese governmental discourse is of vital importance to the foreign publicity of the People's Republic of China. A survey of the efficiency of existing translations of Chinese official slogans was conducted by the author during her one-year stay at the University of Cambridge as a visiting scholar in 2007 and 2008. Through questionnaires circulated among and follow-up interviews of English native speakers, it was found that although a majority of the slogans made sense to them, certain misunderstandings still existed due to ideological, cultural and linguistic differences. It is of great significance to have a thorough understanding of culturally loaded meanings of government discourses and to translate them appropriately into foreign languages. Through analyses and comparisons of the culturally loaded meanings of some typical political words in English and Chinese, the author has explored the phenomenon, types and reasons for misunderstanding, mistranslation and misleading of their implications. Thus the author points out that the final goal of translation and translation efficiency serve as the criteria for evaluation of governmental discourse translation. The author also proposes that foreignization is a most effective means to achieve efficiency and among various translation strategies, free translation and literal translation are the most effective ones which make a relatively high coverage and acceptance of translated expressions. Publicity translation of Chinese governmental discourse should also follow"three principles", that is, to be close to the development of contemporary China, close to the information demand for China of target readers, close to mind habits of target readers. (Huang, 2004:27)Through analysis, it has been established that the strategic utilization of governmental discourse is not only a problem of language or courtesy, but also one that has important strategic significance. Detailed exploration of governmental discourse and skilled application of discourse strategies can improve the leadership and influence of our national governmental discourse in international affairs, thereby promoting the efficiency and appeal of governmental discourse.Therefore, the author proposes that strategic application of governmental discourse from the perspective of national image and soft power construction be emphasized. It is proposed that vigorous efforts be undertaken to strengthen the efficiency of governmental discourse and enhance the leadership and influence of national discourse. Specific suggestions include employing carefully integrated, top-level planning, establishing coordination mechanisms, paying meticulous attention to details, and wisely using such strategies as default strategy, rhetorical strategy and foreign language translation strategy.Expansion of China's right to international discourse is a reasonable demand in response to the current international system dominated by Western countries. In constructing China's identity as a"responsible power", China needs to resolve certain issues. One is how to determine the right to international discourse. Another is how to employ effective channels to win the initiative in competition for the right to international discourse. China must actively participate in international affairs, let the world understand Chinese natural rights and concerns, and enjoy the right to international discourse corresponding to her role as a responsible power. This is where China's national interest lies.6. Contribution and limitationsThe extensive research on which this thesis is based has yielded several articles published in indexed academic journals both in China and abroad, such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Translation Studies, Foreign Language Studies, Theo... |
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