Chinese And American Communication Styles And Cultural Patterns

The present study applies comparative analysis to deal with a case study to compare communication styles between China and U.S.A. through analyzing speeches delivered by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in American universities, and American former president Bush and incumbent president Obama’s speeches made in Chinese universities, from linguistic levels, such as lexical, semantic, syntactic and discoursal, so as to contrast their differences in cultural patterns. Most of previous studies of speeches mainly focused on communicational strategies or perceptions hidden behind ideology. And there were many researches on comparison of cultural values in different nationalities by discussion various social phenomena. However, only a few studies discussed communication styles and cultural patterns purely from a perspective of language in speeches. This study breaks away from previous studies on political discourses, focusing on strong sense of political colors and strategies for speeches, so it pay more attention to social cultural factors embodied in language itself. By comparing language features and phenomenon of both Chinese and English, the author tries to prove that the cultural differences between Chinese and American is one of the most important factors affecting their use of language.The four speech samples are collected from the official website of China Daily, White house, GOV.cn and people.com.cn. The methodologies of comparative discourse analysis applied in this thesis are mixed with linguistic branches in hierarchical level as lexical, semantic and syntactic, by using theories in functional grammar and discourse analysis. The study attempts to minimize political, situational or other possible factors which might affect people’s language usage, and it is supposed to discuss the relationship between culture and the use of language in a relatively pure occasion, contributing to reliability and validity for comparative analysis. The research questions of this thesis are:What characteristics of Chinese and American leaders’communication styles can be found in their speeches respectively? What kinds of different cultural patterns can be found by comparing Chinese and American leaders’communication styles? Can this thesis illustrate the relationship between culture and use of language in the campus speech made by Sino-U.S. leaders? What can the second language learners get from it and how can they adapt themselves to do better in intercultural communication?In order to settle the above problems, the author applies descriptive research method. Differences on formality, impersonality and directness between Chinese and U.S. leaders’ speeches have been explored in details. Those different communication styles are finally attributed into Chinese and American differences in cultural patterns.The major findings of this study are:The communication styles of Chinese leaders tend to be status-oriented, task-oriented and indirect and the ones of American leaders tend to relation-oriented, people-oriented and direct. Chinese culture are high-power distance, high-context and collective culture; American culture are low-power distance, low-context and individual culture. Sino-U.S. leaders’differences on communication styles are mainly caused by different cultural patterns they have; meanwhile, their use of language is a typical reflection of their belonging culture. These two conceptions are closely related to each other.