Chinese and German political discourse in contrast. An analysis of speeches at UN meetings on climate change from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics

United Nations (UN) meetings are pivotal moments in international relations, during which world leaders come together to discuss topics of global relevance and that raise issues of often sensitive nature. In these contexts, speeches are delivered by the participants to the meetings (e.g., world leaders or their representatives) within a specific and ritualised framework. As a genre of political communication (Cap and Okulska 2013), speeches at UN meetings can be analysed to identify the recurrent linguistic patterns and their pragmatic functions that operate in the construction of the discourse on a specific topic. This appears to be particularly interesting when the analysis is carried out in a contrastive vein, and, specifically, when investigating, from the perspective of Cross-Cultural Pragmatics (House and Kádár 2021 and 2022), how these recurrent patterns and functions are realised by speakers of typologically distant linguacultures. Based on these premises, the present paper explores Chinese and German political discourse on climate change in the context of UN meetings from a contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatic perspective. Specifically, it provides an analysis of a corpus of speeches delivered by China’s and Germany’s representatives during meetings held to discuss issues concerning climate change within the framework of the UN (e.g., the Conference of Parties, the Climate Ambition Summit, etc.). The objective of the paper is thus to provide an analysis of the conventionalised expressions employed in the standard situations in which the speeches under scrutiny occur, the different speech acts these expressions realise and observe them in their discourse context, also contrastively highlighting differences and similarities between the Chinese and German texts. From a broader perspective, the paper also aims to contribute to the understanding of the different discursive and pragmatic strategies employed by the political representatives of China and Germany to present to the international community their country’s endeavours in contrasting climate change, which, as a global matter of major importance, intertwines with issues related to image-building and consensus-gathering on the part of the different countries, both domestically and internationally. References: Cap, Piotr, and Urszula Okulska. 2013. “Analyzing genres in political communication: An introduction”. In Analyzing genres in political communication, edited by Piotr Cap, and Urszula Okulska, 1-26. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. House, Juliane, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2022. “Political Language in Contrast: An Introduction”. Journal of Pragmatics 188: 132-137.