A Comparative Study of Interactional Meta-discourse in English Speeches of Chinese and American Stateswomen

Abstract

By comparing Hillary and Fu Ying’s political speeches from the perspective of interactional meta-discourse, this paper is aimed at exploring the similarities and differences of Chinese and American stateswomen’s employment of interactional meta-discourse in their political speeches, and discussing the possible causes of such similarities and distinctions. This study suggests that interactional meta-discourse are frequently used in English speeches of both Chinese and American stateswomen, but American stateswomen utilize much more interactional meta-discourse than their Chinese counterparts. As for the five sub-categories, engagement marker and self-mention occur the most repeatedly, whereas booster the least frequently in both corpora. However, Chinese stateswomen use more hedges but less attitude marker, self-mention and engagement marker than American stateswomen. The reasons for such similarities may be the necessity of interacting with the audience in a political speech, while the causes of distinctions may be the different cultural backgrounds and expression styles of China and America.