A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Political Request Speech Acts

Politics and language are intimately intertwined.To link the study of these dimensions is to seek to understand something very central to human behavior.A request means asking for something and wishing to be satisfied.Requests play a leading role in both the interpersonal and public communications.Research on request speech act has been mainly focused on the combination of speech act theory,politeness principles and face theory.The study on the commonalities and differences of political requests between countries and the sociocultural factors affecting them need to be explored in depth.Examining the naturally occurring data of request speech acts collected from the press conferences of the Chinese and American Foreign Ministries(2015-2018),this study combines pragmatic theory with corpus analysis.Through quantitative statistics and comparative analysis of the speech acts of Chinese and American foreign ministry spokesmen requests in the past four years,it figures out the similarities and differences of Chinese and American political request speech act strategies,requests perspective and modification.Meanwhile,the sociocultural factors for the similarities and differences of Chinese and American political requests speech acts are taken into account.The results of contrastive analysis show that there are similarities and signifieant differences in the choice of strategies and perspectives between Chinese and American political request speech acts.(1)The comparative analysis of request strategies reveals that the similarities between Chinese and Ameriean politieal request strategies are the preferred want statement strategy.Moreover,the use of mood-derivable and conventionally indirect strategies is not high in both countries.In the American political context,the request strategy is more evenly-distributed and the frequency of performative strategy and obligation statement strategy is similar,but in the Chinese political context,the request strategy focuses on want statement strategy and performative strategy.By analyzing the high-frequency keywords of request strategy,it is concluded that the keywords of Chinese political request strategy are focused on the use of "希望"and "愿",while the United States is relatively rich in the variety of the lexical requests.(2)In choosing the speaker-oriented request perspective of political request speech acts between China and the United States,they both first adopted "we"as the speaker-oriented request perspective in political request speech acts.The Chinese side also prefers to use“中方”as the speaker-oriented request perspective,while the American side generally prefers "I" as the speaker-oriented request perspective and the differences between them are significant.The United States rarely uses the nouns representing country to express the speaker-oriented request perspective,and China hardly uses "I" as the speaker-oriented request perspective.(3)In the use of external modification in the request speech acts in the Chinese and American political context,the Chinese spokesmen prefer the use of more external modifications than the American spokesmen do,the Chinese spokesmen highlight the external modification before the head act,while the American spokesmen emphasize the external modification after the head act,both China and the United States prefer Ground as the external modification to perform requests,and the frequency of the use is very high.(4)The reasons for these differences include cultural differences,national position,and linguistic differences between the two countries.This research provides a new perspective for Political Request Speech Acts studies.The corpus-based research provides a new approach to this field,enriches and improves relevant theories,and promotes the further study of pragmatics.In addition,it is of great significance to promote cooperation,establish interconnection,facilitate development and gain win-win results beneficially and friendly between the two countries.