A Contrastive Research On Evasive Strategies Employed By Chinese And American Spokespersons On The South China Sea Issue

At press conferences,spokespersons frequently use evasive strategies to answer difficult questions proposed by journalists.Reported empirical studies have mostly focused on contrastive researches in a certain period.However,contrastive research of a certain event received much less attention.Taking the South China Sea Issue for example,this paper contrastively studies evasive strategies employed by Chinese and American spokespersons.The aims of this thesis are:1.to explore different evasive strategies used by Chinese and American spokespersons;2.to count up using frequency and percentage of different evasive strategies;3.to contrast similarities and differences between Chinese and American spokespersons when using evasive strategies;4.to contrastively analyze corpus under the framework of Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory;5.to state reasons leading to the differences.There are five findings from this study.First,Chinese and American spokespersons use large quantities of evasive strategies at press conference.The number of using evasive strategies is over eighty percent of the whole research units.Second,the evasive strategies employed by Chinese spokespersons and American spokespersons at press conferences show substantial differences regarding using frequency of different evasive strategies.For instance,Chinese spokespersons use more covert evasion than American spokespersons.Third,the maxims of quantity,manner,or relation are usually flouted by both Chinese and American spokespersons,and Cooperative Principle is often violated.Fourth,using evasive strategies,answers of both Chinese and American spokespersons fit Relevance Theory with varying degrees.In other words,contextual effects is improved by the spokespersons and the processing effort of the journalist is reduced.Last,there are four reasons for those differences mentioned above between Chinese spokespersons and American spokespersons when using evasive strategies:sexual distinction,language,culture,national position and national principles.Based on the study,the author wishes to enrich research theories on evasive strategies.What's more,the author would like to give some advice on how to communicate with others,especially when answering difficult questions.Finally,different ways of using evasive strategies and selection of different evasive strategies between Chinese and American spokespersons give us knowledge of intercultural communication.