Role and Reference Grammar in Chinese and American Central Bank Speeches: A Cross-Cultural Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study applies Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) to investigate how linguistic structures encode agency, responsibility, and institutional identity in monetary policy discourses across distinct political systems. Focusing on 10 speeches from the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) Chairs and 10 addresses from the Governors of People’s Bank of China (the PBC) (2015–2024) respectively, the research examines syntactic templates, semantic role mapping (Actor, Undergoer, Instrument), and pragmatic focus structures through a comparative RRG framework. Quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal systematic contrasts: English discourses prioritize transitive clauses, explicitly framing the Fed as the grammatical Actor (e.g., “We will adjust interest rates to stabilize markets”), thereby emphasizing institutional accountability and force-dynamic causality. In contrast, Chinese discourses favor topic-comment structures, omitting or generalizing Agents (e.g., “Safeguarding financial stability [Focus]”) to foreground collective action and policy outcomes. Thematic roles in Chinese texts frequently assign Undergoers to abstract goals (e.g., “supporting small enterprises”), aligning with socio-political norms of collective governance. Methodologically, the study integrates RRG’s layered clause analysis with corpus-driven annotation, coding for syntactic typology (transitive / intransitive / topic-comment), focus breadth (narrow or broad focus), and cultural-institutional contextualization. These findings highlight how grammatical choices mediate authority and transparency: English clauses reinforce individualistic accountability, while Chinese structures embed decisions within communal frameworks. Theoretically, this work advances RRG’s application to institutional discourse, demonstrating its utility in decoding cross-cultural pragmatics. Practically, it offers actionable insights for central banks to optimize policy communication in multilingual contexts, balancing syntactic precision with cultural resonance.