Genre Analysis and Comparison of Chinese and American Presidents’ New Year Messages

Abstract

NewYear 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 (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.