Comparative Analysis Of Linguistic Realization Of Cultural Values And Ideologies In Chinese President Hu Jintao And U.S. President George W. Bush's Speeches

Since the past few decades, many researches have been devoted to political discourse analysis. Many scholars have devoted their efforts to analyzing political discourse from the approach of critical discourse analysis. However, due to its focus on relationship between language and power, and language and ideology, studies in the past mainly focused on revealing ideology hidden behind linguistic units and language phenomenon.The present study applies contrastive discourse analysis to conduct a case study to contrast the cultural values, patterns of thought and ideology between two different nations, U.S. and China, through analyzing speeches delivered by U.S. President George W. Bush and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao.Developed and promoted by Basil Hatim and Scollons abroad, contrastive discourse analysis is a multidisciplinary approach with the combination of contrastive linguistics and discourse analysis. Theories and methodologies of contrastive discourse analysis in my thesis are attributed to a mixture of such linguistic branches as functional grammar, pragmatics, and critical discourse analysis. Differences lying in tenor, rhetorical strategies together with those on the sentence level and emotive devices between Chinese and U.S. President's speeches will be explored in depth.Ten pairs of speech samples are collected from the official website of White House, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Xinhuanet.com. Each pair shares similar topic or occasion. This similarity in terms of topic or occasion contributes to validity and reliability of samples for comparative analysis.The present study is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 is the introduction of the thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review of the main theoretical achievements by both western and Chinese scholars on political discourse analysis. Chapter 3 deals with methodology and analytic framework concerning contrastive discourse analysis. This chapter is also concerned with data collection and features of political discourse. Chapter 4 is devoted to comparative analysis of Chinese and U.S. President's speeches using the methodology of functional grammar, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. Chapter 5 is the concluding part, summarizing the present study, implications and its limitations and suggestions for further improvement.The present study has its significance in providing a comprehensive picture of differences between Chinese and U.S. President's speeches. Through a comparative analysis of linguistic units and language phenomenon in two different languages, contrastive discourse analysis tries to uncover the differences between China and U.S. in terms of cultural values, patterns of thought and ideologies. The comparison at the sentential level, tenor, rhetorical strategy and utilization of emotive devices are complementary to each other. This multidisciplinary approach towards political discourse has the effect of breaking out from the restricted analytic framework and adding cultural element. This is a big step forward compared with the past study, which mainly focused on differences in ideology.