摘要
New Year messages offered by political leaders are important media events every year. However, as a special political discourse, the New Year message is a scarcely explored area. Adopting a genre approach （e.g., Halliday, 1978; 1985; Halliday ＆ Hasan, 1989; Martin, 1984; Martin ＆ Rose, 2003; Paltridge, 2006）, this study systematically analyzed a small corpus of six New Year messages given by Chinese and American presidents in the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 at three levels： sociocultural context, discourse structure and language features. This study shows that New Year messages do form an independent genre because of their shared communicative functions, relatively fixed generic structure and salient lexical-grammatical features （Bruce, 2008）. It also reveals similarities and differences between New Year messages given by the two presidents from different cultures and political systems. This study argues that despite their respective features, all these New Year messages, as a special political discourse, target a large audience and aim to promote public relationships and obtain political support. It also demonstrates that the genre approach is a very powerful tool to uncover a discourse＇s communicative functions and the rhetorical strategies and linguistic resources available to realize these functions.
各国政治领袖们的新年贺辞是每年一次的重要媒体事件。然而,作为一种特殊的政治话语,这类贺辞却是一个很少被应用语言学学者们研究的领域。本研究采用体裁研究方法(e.g., Halliday, 1978; 1985; Halliday & Hasan, 1989; Martin, 1984; Martin & Rose, 2003; Paltridge,2006)在社会文化语境、篇章结构和语言特点三个层面系统地分析了中美两国元首在 2007、2008 和 2009 三年所作的六篇新年贺辞。本研究表明,由于这些新年贺辞所共有的交际功能、相对固定的篇章结构和突出的词汇语法特点,它们可以被视为一种独立的体裁 (Bruce,2008)。本研究还发现,尽管两位国家元首的新年贺辞在以上三个层面都体现了各自的特点,但作为同一种特殊的政治话语它们都指向大批受众并以提升公共关系和争取政治支持为目的。本文还证明了体裁分析方法是揭示某一特殊话语的真实交际目的和呈现被综合使用的各种修辞与语言资源的强大工具,因而值得在其他话语研究中推广使用。
