The Pragmatic Strategies Of Poverty Alleviation Reports In The Chinese State Media: A Critical Pragmatic Study

Unlike personal or institutional discourse,poverty alleviation discourse has its distinctive pragmatic features.Examining the pragmatic strategies in poverty alleviation reports is instructive for analyzing the social environment constructed by the media and developing the discourse system of poverty alleviation with Chinese cultural characteristics.However,the existing studies have not systematically examined the pragmatic strategies in poverty alleviation reports and made a necessary theoretical overview,especially as there is no literature that has interpreted them from a positive critical pragmatic perspective.Thus,this study integrates the analytical framework of critical pragmatic analysis(Chen,2013)and ritual theory(Kádár,2017),providing an empirical investigation of pragmatic strategies in poverty alleviation reports from three dimensions:pragmalinguistic devices,ritual features and critical pragmatic motivations.This study conducts a qualitative and quantitative research by selecting a total of 100 poverty alleviation narrative reports in People’s Daily from 2018-2021.This study tends to examine: 1)pragmatic strategies used in poverty alleviation reports at lexical,rhetorical and discursive levels;2)the relationship between the use of pragmatic strategies and ritual;3)the pragmatic motivations of the above-mentioned strategies from a critical pragmatic perspective.The research findings are as follows: 1)At the lexical level,the pragmatic strategies are mainly manifested in the strategic use of referential terms for impoverished people,the use of high-value modal operators and the use of unmarked reporting verbs;at the rhetorical level,the pragmatic strategies primarily include the use of simile,metaphor,repetition and parallelism;at the discursive level,the pragmatic strategies are mainly reflected in the patterns of how various conventionalized set parts co-occur in the reports in an optimistic manner.2)The use of these pragmatic strategies reflects the state media’s perception of its rights and obligations,the reproduction of moral order,and the construction of a complex participatory structure;such reports are not ad hoc in nature,i.e.,they represent domestic ritualized language use in China’s poverty alleviation discourse.3)The pragmatic motivations demonstrate that such pragmatic strategies are influenced by China’s historical background,national policies and national culture.In conclusion,this study confirms the applicability of ritual theory in the analysis of pragmatic strategies of poverty alleviation reports and provides an insightful reference for the related positive CPA studies.More importantly,it has practical significance for constructing the discourse system of poverty alleviation with Chinese characteristics.