商务英语演讲辞的问题分析.doc

Abstract

This thesis is to discuss the problems from three dimensions: linguistic description, schematic structure and text functioning, or namely, linguistic description, textual analysis. In chapter one, it will discuss the definitions of stylistics and the development of stylistic analysis. In chapter two it gives a general understanding of business speech. In chapter three, it tries to analyze the schematic structure for business speech. In the last part, it explores the linguistic features in vocabulary characteristics and it shows the importance of language and offers a number of practical guides for using words accurately, clearly, vividly and appropriately.

Key words: business speech; stylistic analysis 中文摘要

进入WTO时代，中国国际化的步伐越来越快，商务英语不仅已经成为国际商务沟通的工具，同时也变成了驰聘商场必备的筹码，其重要性不言而喻。通过所选的商务会议演讲文本的比较分析研究，总结出此类演讲文本的语言及结构上的特征，以及形成这些特征的语域因素。这将会在实际工作中对商务英语的使用者，英语教学者及翻译工作者有所启发，期望本文的研究能够为以后这类话题更为系统和全面的研究提供参考作用。
作为国际性商务人员必备的技能之一，商务英语演讲不仅显示出演讲者的英语表达的水平，更能体现出演讲者的综合素质。然而，如何成功地进行商务英语演讲对许多从业人员，特别是非英语国家的从业人员而言，仍是一大挑战。
目前国内有大量研究商务演讲文体的文章，但国外的研究不多，而且不太深入。本文采用实例语料。从三个方面分析研究了选材，即语言分析，文体分析。在演讲实例中，语言层面和组织结构上有共同之处，作为商务英语演讲文本，要具备意义准确，用词恰当，表达直接以及条理清晰等特点。

关键词：商务演讲;文体分析

Chapter 1 Introduction

Nowadays, more people have realized the importance of public speaking and made conscious effort to develop the ability to speak in public. With the development of economic globalization, more and more countries are interrelated. Business conference English speaking, however, is of great significance in further strengthen cooperation with other countries and has become common in international business settings. In some developed countries like America, courses in public speaking or some similar courses are commonly offered in universities. The students are required or encouraged to take the courses. There are also special clubs and journals of public speaking in those countries. In China public speaking has also become very flourishing in recent years. More and more Chinese people have become interested in public speaking and therefore participated in public speaking activities. However, to understand the importance and value of public speaking, especially business conference English speaking, still deserves attention. More often than not, there are many problems about business conference English speaking during the course of being addressed by speakers or being received by audiences.
The author thinks that problems may result from three factors. First thing first, language choice in business conference, including the speech formats, and the principle of choosing words and sentences are the most important. The second is lack of professional knowledge in understanding business English .It is a matter of the qualification of the speaker and the audience. Since the conferences they participate are business-oriented, to some extent, some basic professional knowledge is a necessity to the participants. Last but not least, cultural shock exists in almost every setting which involves people from different countries. However, the influence of cultural shock varies in any specific setting.
The purpose of this thesis tries to suggest how language factors influence the English-language speeches, and how identification between speakers and audiences id affected interpersonally when those speeches employ the proper words and sentence, figure of speech and speech structure. Therefore, the focus of this thesis lies in the employment of English language in business conference speech texts. It will illustrate some of linguistic, textual, contextual, analysis, including the stylistic features at the phonological level, lexical level, syntactical level, schematic structure, cohesive devices and its contextual level by means of quantitative analysis.
The whole thesis can be divided into five chapters.
The first chapter deals with the review of style and stylistics including definitions of style and what stylistics studies and the development of stylistics.
The second chapter is a general understanding of business English speech, including the definition of business speech, the classification of business English Speech and the features of effective business speech.
The third chapter is about schematic structure and the employed devices to examine the organization of the speeches.
As for the fourth chapter, it will deals with the language choice in speeches. By comparing and contrasting some speeches at phonological level, lexical level, syntactical level.
At last, conclusion part will serve as a summary of the thesis, drawing a conclusion and giving suggestions about making and understanding business conference English speeches.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

This chapter will discuss the definitions of stylistics and the development of stylistic analysis from various sources. It also deals with a general understanding of business English speech.

2.1 The Definition and Development of Stylistics
Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context, and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. A variety, in this sense, is a situationally distinctive use of language. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’ or are said to use a particular 'style'.
Stylistics is a branch of linguistics, which deals with the study of varieties of language, its properties, principles behind choice, dialogue, accent, length, and register.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation, the production and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and people’s dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc.
The development of Stylistics, given that it combines the use of linguistic analysis with what we know about the psychological processes involved in reading, depended (at least in part) on the study of Linguistics and Psychology (both largely twentieth-century phenomena) becoming reasonably established. Stylistics, then, is a sub-discipline which grew up in the second half of the twentieth century: Its beginnings in Anglo-American criticism are usually traced back to the publication of the books listed below. Three of them are collections of articles, some of which had been presented as conference papers or published in journals a little earlier.
·
· Fowler, Roger (ed.) (1966) Essays on Style in Language.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
· Freeman, Donald C. (ed.) (1971) Linguistics and Literary Style.
· New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
· Leech, Geoffrey N, (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman.
· Sebeok, Thomas A. (1960) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
·
Perhaps the most influential article is that by Roman Jakobson in Sebeok (1960: 350-77). It is called 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' because it was a contribution to a conference which Sebeok (1960) published as a collection of papers. Jakobson is an important figure who connects together various strands in the development of Stylistics.
Stylistics can be seen as a logical extension of moves within literary criticism early in the twentieth century to concentrate on studying texts rather than authors. Nineteenth-century literary criticism concentrated on the author, and in Britain the text-based criticism of the two critics I. A. Richards and William Empson, his pupil, rejected that approach in order to concentrate on the literary texts themselves, and how readers were affected by those texts. This approach is often called Practical Criticism, and it is matched by a similar critical movement in the USA, associated with Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, Austin Warren and others, called New Criticism.
There is another important strand of influence in the development of Stylistics (the one which Roman Jakobson was involved in) which comes from Eastern Europe. In the early years of the twentieth century, the members of the Formalist Linguistic Circle in Moscow (usually called the Russian Formalists).Later on,they began to develop what became a very influential aspect of textual study in later Stylistics, called foregrounding theory.
The Russian Formalists were, in effect, the first stylisticians. But their work was not understood in the west because of the effects of the Russian Revolution in 1917. After the revolution, formalism fell out of favour and, in any case, academic communication between what became the Soviet Union and Western Europe and North America virtually ceased.
Roman Jakobson became one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century, and the reason for his considerable influence on Stylistics, in addition to his own academic brilliance, was because he linked various schools of Linguistics together. He left Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution and moved to Prague, where he became a member of the Prague Structuralist circle, who were also very interested in the linguistic structure of texts and how they affected readers. Then, when Czechoslovakia also became communist, he moved to the USA. Rather like a beneficial virus, he carried the approach which later became called Stylistics with him, and helped those who wanted to develop Practical and New Criticism in more precise analytical directions.
The term 'Stylistics' became associated with detailed linguistic criticism because, at the time it developed, the study of authorial style was a major critical concern, and linguistic analysis, allied to statistics, was popular with the more linguistically inclined critics. To some degree, it is a less happy name now, as stylisticians have, by and large, moved away from the study of style and towards the study of how meanings and effects are produced by literary texts. There have been a few attempts to change the name of the enterprise: for example to 'literary linguistics' or 'critical linguistics'. But none of the labels so far proposed covers all the aspects of field adequately (for example the two just mentioned can just as easily apply to areas not covered by Stylistics and do not adequately represent the psychological aspects of the approach), and so 'Stylistics' has survived as the most popular label, despite its shortcomings.
2.2 The Definition of Business Speech
English public speaking is the transmission of a message in English from one person who addresses to an audience who is physically present. Public speaking is not a new trend. In fact, people have been speaking in public since human beings first developed the ability to talk. Public speaking is a skill that everyone needs to learn. Almost everyone of us will be involved in public speaking in some form at some point in our lives so that we need to be prepared to do a good job when that time comes. Of course, even if you are never called upon to vocalize your own ideas in front of others, learning how to effectively speak in public will increase your confidence, and make you more comfortable with other people. Being an effective public speaker can give you the tools to make you success in your business, in your community, even in the world.
Public speech is an important social-cultural phenomenon. It covers a fairly large range. So far as the field is concerned, there are speeches like the business manager explaining next year’ budget, the military officer briefing subordinates, the teacher lecturing in a classroom, the union leader informing members about details in the mew contrast; there are speeches on questions of fact, on questions of value, and on questions of policy and there are also speeches on special occasion: speeches of introduction, of presentation, of acceptance and commemorative speeches, etc. So far as the functional tenor is concerned, speeches can be formal or less formal or informal. So far as the mode is concerned, there are impromptu speeches (speeches made on the spot), speeches with a set of brief motes or an outline to jog the memory, speeches from reciting and speeches from a manuscript; but many of the speeches are written to be spoken before an audience. Of all aspects of public speaking, persuasion is the most complex and difficult. Its job is to change the audience’s minds to get them to agree and perhaps to act. Its goal may be to defend an idea, to refute an opponent, to sell a programme, or to inspire people to action.
In many ways public speeches are similar to daily conversation. In both, the addresser has to tailor his/her message to the addressee and adapt to the addressee’s feedback and both public speeches and daily conversation make full use of prosodic and paralinguistic features for expression. But public speaking is also different from daily conversation in that it concentrates on one topic with highly structured format and more formal language. Public speeches make a more effective way of delivery. Public speaking shows the characteristics of highly logical organization of thoughts, closely-knit structure and formal language. It differs from the written mode in that the latter does not have to and cannot adapt to readers’ immediate feedback or rely on skilful vocal delivery.
As an important variety, public speech has drawn attention of many stylisticians, such as Wang Zuoliang, Hu Zhuanglin, Xu Youzhi, Xu Zhenzhong in China, and M.A.K.Halliday, Martine Joos, Ofer Feldman, Robert C. Pooley abroad. They have discussed the stylistic features of English speaking in many of their works, such as: An Introduction to English Stylistic (Wang Zuoliang,1987)，“Discussion on the style of English address” (Xu Zhenzhong,1990:28), “On English Public Speaking” (Xu Youzhi, 1994:19), “Language, Context and Text” (Halliday, 2001), The Five Clocks (Joos, 1961), Politically Speaking (Feldman, 1998). Wang Zuoliang and Xu Youzhi mainly study the degree of formality of public speaking and some semantic color of public speaking, while Hu Zhuanglin emphasizes the importance of “context” in stylistic analysis of public speech. According to Hu Zhuanglin, the contexts include social-cultural context and context of situation. British systemic-functional linguistic, Halliday mainly advocates the functional linguistic theory, especially the theory about foregrounding in stylistic analysis of public speech.
The thesis intends to give a detailed analysis to the stylistic features of the pu