An Analysis Of Chinese Government Officials’ Response Strategies To Adversarial Questions Raised By Journalists

The public often pay great attention to the part of journalists’ questioning at press conferences.In this part,journalists tend to raise some acute and adversarial questions.In order to better answer these questions,spokespersons must be cautious about their responses.They should not only maintain the national image and interests,but also try their best to avoid the potential conflicts.Within the framework of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and based on the classifications of response strategies proposed by Bull and Mayer(1993)and Jiang(2006),this thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze Chinese government officials’ response strategies to journalists’ different adversarial questions at press conferences.The final results are presented as follows:(1)Government officials use more direct response strategies than evasive response and refusal response,with refusal response the least.Direct response becomes the major strategy compared with the previous studies.(2)Among the three types of response strategies,sub-types of evasive response are more diversified but the variety of direct response and refusal response is less.For the refusal response,officials only adopt indirect refusal strategies.(3)To answer different adversarial questions,obvious differences exist among the use of evasive response and refusal response strategies.For the questions which have higher degree of adversarialness,the use of refusal response has increased significantly.The facts show that in the public context,government officials tend to directly answer journalists’ adversarial questions and eliminate the influences caused by the unfavorable and false comments on the nation.’ Different distributions among the response strategies to different adversarial questions also demonstrate that questions’ adversarialness degrees may also cause influences on the government officials’ choices of response strategies.From the perspective of Linguistic Adaptation Theory,spokespersons and journalists,the international relationship between the countries they represent,the atmosphere at the press conferences and spokespersons’and journalists’ complex mental activities all influence their choices of language.