《11 Chinese Spring Festival》.pdf

China Media Research, 4(4), 2008, You Chen, Discursive Construction of Chinese Spring Festival Celebration The Discursive Construction of Chinese Spring Festival Celebration as a Site of Harmonious Intercultural Communication Zeshun You Jianping Chen Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Abstracts: This article is an effort to find out how Chinese Spring Festival celebration is constructed discursively as a site of harmonious intercultural communication, how the construction is historically and socially influenced, and why it is constructed in such a way. It adopts van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to analyze Chinese news reports and commentaries and Wodak’s discourse-historical approach to scrutinize the historical and philosophical origin of the discourse. The analysis demonstrates that Chinese writers struggle hard to elaborate the “harmony” enmeshed in the celebration held in intercultural settings by literal reiteration, selective use of pronouns, cultural symbol depicting and social activity description. The “harmony” being referred to is emphasized in the construction because it is the core value of traditional Chinese Taoism and Confucianism. It has become a kind of historical discourse which penetrates into every corner of Chinese society; the discursive strategies are chosen not at random, but in fact they fall right into the established cognitive framework of Chinese people which makes the construction better accepted. [China Media Research. 2008; 4(4): 92-101] Keywords: Harmony, Chinese Spring Festival, critical discourse analysis, socio-cognitive approach, discourse- historical approach, intercultural communication Spring Festival, the New Year’s Day accord