Discourse Semantic Analysis Of Official Documents Of Chinese Public Administrative Departments

Based on a qualitative analysis, this thesis as a tentative study will explore and account for the discourse semantic resources used in official documents of Chinese public administrative departments.There are three reasons'for the present study. First. Chinese official documents are issued on the conditions that some significant meetings are held, and that typical social affairs happen and that important information needs to be noticed. That is to say, official documents are issued by public administrative departments to implement policies or convey opinions or exchange information. Therefore, official documents become the most effective communicative means to handle public affairs for all the institutions. And 'official documents have been thought of as a type of goal-oriented human communicative activities with three definite and clear purposes:the informative purpose, the directive purpose and the persuasive purpose which is also the ultimate objective. Except some rhetorical strategies and literature means, official language would be skillfully manipulated to increase the significance of some affairs so as to realize the goal of persuasion. So how these linguistic resources are selected is worth studying. Secondly, although some scholars have made contributions to the research of official documents from the perspectives of practical writing, rhetoric and pragmatics, it is a margin to study official documents from the point of discourse analysis. Thirdly, although there are various approaches to discourse analysis such as Cohesion, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Macrostructure ect. they mainly focus on the level of the clause. The discourse semantics proposed by Martin and Rose within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics has made a further development of discourse analysis, which consists of five systems:Appraisal, Ideation, Conjunction, Identification and Periodicity. These systems are combined to realize ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning at the discourse level. Since official documents belong to written discourses, it is available to apply the theory of discourse semantics to explore the discourse semantic resources used in Chinese official documents. The application of these discourse semantic systems to analyze official documents will make clear how the deliverers express their attitudes and how they construct the statement of the affairs logically.In order to keep the analysis manageable, we intensively choose ten official documents from two sources:one is a magazine of the Gazette, and the other is a textbook of Practical Writing Course. Adopting a qualitative method to verify the supposed results, this thesis aims at solving two questions:1) what kinds of discourse semantic resources are used in official documents? 2) What kinds of meanings are presented in the unfolding of Chinese official documents? As a result, the exploration of the discourse semantic choices in official documents is the main objective of this thesis. According to our research, Chinese official documents foreground the judgement of the receivers'would-be behavior to make evaluation objective and serious. The official document is fact-based to state the truth of the affairs. And they are coherent discourse with definite reference and periodic information structure. All these discourse semantic resources work together to make the gist of official documents clear and well-supported and the structure logical and compact for easier understanding and reception..It is hoped that the research will give some inspiration on the preparation of official documents, especially the teaching and learning of official documents. We also hope that this analysis can benefit to promote the understanding among public administrative departments and enhance the relationship between public administrative departments and the people as well as heightening people's trust in the public departments and constructing social harmony.The overall organization covers five parts:Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to this thesis about its rationale, objective, data, method and the overall organization. Chapter 2 firstly reviews the studies on discourse and discourse analysis as well as several relevant theories related to discourse analysis including Prague school of linguistic analysis, cohesion, Systemic Functional Linguistics and van Dijk's "Macrostructures". Then, the research status quo of official documents is introduced in this chapter to justify the subject choice of the present study. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework of this thesis---the discourse semantics proposed by Martin and Rose (2003) with its five systems. Chapter 4 applies the five semantic systems to analyze the discourse semantic resources used in official documents. Chapter 5 draws a conclusion of this thesis. First the main idea of the thesis is summarized and then the implications as well as the limitations and suggestion for further research are pointed out.