A Study Of Interpersonal Meanings In Chinese And English Economic Speeches

It has been well known that economic speeches (public speeches on economy) play anindispensable role among various public speeches, whose contents are mainly relevant todiverse economic affairs and issues. Economic speeches, as a significant type of publicspeeches, have some certain features and characteristics, i.e. most economic speeches areaccurate in numbers and statistics, and have concrete, logical, and persuasive contents.Researchers and scholars used to concentrate more on political speeches rather than economicspeeches, in this sense, this paper has selected two oral speeches delivered by twocounterparts, one was delivered by Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao at the summer WorldEconomic Forum in DaLian,2011, and the other delivered by Britain Prime Minister DavidCameron in Davos, Swiss,2012.This paper has adopted Halliday’s interpersonal function as the analytical tool,combining qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis aiming to unveil interpersonalmeanings by analyzing how mood system, modality system as well as person pronoun, tense,lexical choice and sentence pattern help in realizing interpersonal meanings. Some otherfactors, such as how culture diversity, nonverbal cues and paralanguages help in realizingcertain interpersonal meanings are taken into consideration as well. In this sense, a contrastiveanalysis is conducted from those aspects mentioned above so as to unveil the implicitinterpersonal meanings in the two samples, and then find out the similarities and differencesin how interpersonal meanings are realized. And further study and discussion would beconducted on two research questions as follows:(1) What interpersonal meanings are realized by addressers in the two sample speeches?(2) In what ways are those interpersonal meanings realized in the selected speeches?Some major findings and conclusions can be drawn as follows by a contrastive analysis.(1) Both the two economic speeches intended to realize interpersonal meaning on building acloser relationship between the addresser and the addressees, arousing mutual sympathy so asto seek international cooperation rather than keep a certain distance.(2) Interpersonal meanings are realized both by verbal messages and nonverbal cues.Specifically speaking, interpersonal meanings can be realized not only by modality systemand mood system, but also by nonverbal cues and paralanguages, such as tone, pause, andsilence. Body movements including hand gestures, even eye contact help in realizing theabove mentioned interpersonal meanings as well.