A Contrastive Study Of Evasion Strategies Employed By Chinese And American Government Officials At Press Conferences

Linguistic evasion takes place frequently in interpersonal exchanges and maycause potential conflicts among interlocutors due to its face-threatening nature. Atpress conferences, government officials (GOs) may face sensitive or tough questions,which they need to evade tactfully, because how they answer concerns thegovernment’s stance and national interests.The paper, based upon Bull and Mayer’s (2003) typology of evasion strategiesand Faerch and Kasper’s (1989) model of internal and external modification of speechacts, attempts to conduct a contrastive study on linguistic evasion performed byChinese government officials (CGOs) and American government officials (AGOs).The author collects120texts of press conference in all,60in English and60inChinese. Evasive speech acts in the data are identified, classified, marked, and thenanalyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.The findings show that:1) CGOs are inclined to employ covert evasion strategies,whereas AGOs tend to use overt evasion strategies. Both CGOs and AGOs use allevasion strategies in the modified framework, but AGOs are more flexible and diversein their choice.2) In terms of modification devices, AGOs favor no marking, butCGOs prefer to use combined devices. Both CGOs and AGOs choose parallelism astheir primary syntactic downgraders. As to external modification devices, AGOsemploy the preparatory alone most frequently, but CGOs most often combine thepreparatory and the grounder.The findings are interpreted from the perspective of interpersonal philosophy andface concern. China’s collectivistic mindset of “courtesy and propriety” and positiveface concern give reasons for CGOs’ preferences for covert evasion strategies andtheir combined use of mitigation devices. In contrast, US’s individualistic nature ofassertiveness, emphasis on personal rights and negative face concern explain whythey prefer overt evasion strategies and employ no linguistic devices to mitigate theirevasive acts.The study extends the boundary of cross-cultural studies on evasive speech andprovides implications for foreign language learning and teaching as well as for cross-cultural studies on other speech acts.