外交部新闻发言人闪避回答的语用分析

A Pragmatic Approach to Evasions at the Press Conferences of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs

本文以2009年1月1日至3月31日的23场外交部新闻发布会内容为语料,运用会话合作原则和关联理论对其中的闪避回答进行分析。主要发现有:(1)闪避回答在外交部新闻发布会上高频出现;(2)闪避回答可分为3类:对事实有所闪避、对立场有所闪避和对事实兼立场皆有所闪避;(3)发言人采用的闪避策略主要有9种。我们认为导致闪避回答的主要原因是发言人和提问记者之间的交际意图冲突;当充分回答不可能时,闪避回答是退而求其次的关联度最高的回答,因为它在发言人制造的语境效果和记者的处理努力之间达成了最佳平衡。

This paper focuses on evasions at the press conferences of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aims at providing a linguistic explanation for the existence and strategies of those evasions within the framework of the Gricean Cooperative Principle and the Relevance Theory. In analyzing 23 press conferences of the Foreign Affairs Ministry from 1 January to 31 March, 2009, we find that evasions are pervasive at those press conferences and three kinds of evasions are identified, namely, evasions on facts, evasions on stances and evasions on both facts and stances. Nine evasion strategies are recognized and analyzed. We propose that it is the inconsistent communicative intentions of the spokesperson and the questioning journalist that give rise to evasive answers, which strike a balance between the most positive contextual effects produced by the spokesperson and the least processing effort requested from the journalist.