Cross-cultural pragmatic differences in US and Chinese press conferences: the case of the North Korea nuclear crisis

This study investigated request and refusal strategies in the question-response sequences of interactions in routine press conferences held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and the US Department of State on the topic of the North Korea nuclear crisis during a period of 5 months. All utterances by journalists were identified as requests, and instances of spokes-persons’ non-compliance with requests were considered to be refusals. Findings demonstrated that: (1) request for specific information was the most frequently adopted strategy in both US and Chinese press conferences, but more clarification and confirmation questions were used in the US data and more questions for comments were found in the Chinese data; (2) in the case of refusals, direct refusals and reasons for refusal were frequent in the US data while avoidance and insufficient answers were prevalent in the Chinese data. The cross-cultural differences in the strategies of requests and refusals are discussed briefly in relation to different ideological and cultural assumptions.