ABSTRACT
Diplomatic discourse is a formalized form of political communication that significantly influences a country's international perception. However, there is a research gap in the analysis of China's diplomatic discourse, particularly in relation to the speeches available on the official Chinese Foreign Ministry website. This study aims to address this gap by conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis of China's diplomatic speeches. This study utilizes a quantitative corpus-assisted discourse analysis to explore the prevalent themes in China's official speeches. Additionally, qualitative discourse analysis is employed to examine the ideologies manifested in specific examples from the official speeches. The research combines a corpus-based approach with critical discourse analysis to investigate language use, discourse practices, and social practices. The analysis of China's diplomatic discourse reveals several key themes related to President Xi Jinping's leadership, international relations, and future community and economy. The findings provide valuable insights into China's diplomatic strategies and its international image, emphasizing its commitment to cooperation, development, and peace. This research contributes to a better understanding of China's diplomatic discourse and its role in shaping international perceptions of the country. By highlighting the prevalent themes and ideologies in China's official speeches, the study emphasizes China's commitment to fostering positive international relations. The findings offer valuable insights into China's diplomatic strategies and its efforts to shape its international image.
ABSTRACT
The study investigates the linguistic aspects of Chinese and American diplomatic discourse using Biber's theoretical underpinnings of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis. The corpus of the study comprises texts taken from the official websites of the Chinese and US governments from 2011 to 2020. The study results show that China's diplomatic discourse falls into the text type of learned exposition which includes informational expositions focused on conveying information. In contrast, the United States diplomatic discourse falls into the text type of "involved persuasion," which is persuasive and argumentative. Furthermore, the two-way ANOVA test reveals few distinctions between spoken and written diplomatic discourse from the same country. Furthermore, T-tests demonstrate that the diplomatic discourse of the two countries differs significantly in three dimensions. In addition, the study highlights that China's diplomatic discourse is informationally dense and context independent. In contrast, the United States diplomatic discourse is emotive and interactional, strongly dependent on context, and created within time restrictions. Finally, the study's findings contribute to a systematic knowledge of the genre aspects of diplomatic discourse and are helpful for more effective diplomatic discourse system creation.
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the changes in China's diplomacy in the past seven decades based on the diachronic corpus of Chinese diplomatic discourse from 1949 to 2018 using corpus based critical discourse analysis theoretical insights. The study examines the targeted keywords used in the seven periods of Chinese diplomatic discourse and their significant collocations. The results show that China has worked with the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and some Asian, Latin American, and African countries to safeguard world peace while opposing war, establish good relations with these countries, and promote mutual development through cooperation. In addition, China's diplomacy has experienced politics-oriented and economy-oriented eras and is now in an era of global sustainable development. Therefore, Chinese diplomatic discourse is the linguistic representation of China's diplomacy, fundamentally determined by its national interests and changing social and historical situations domestically and internationally.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the pragmatic functions of evidentiality categories in diplomatic discourse by illustrating a new classification of English evidentiality. It adopts a data-based approach by analyzing a corpus of thirty English political speeches from three US presidents (including Bush, Obama, and Trump). The results show that: (i) Evidentiality can be classified into three categories: personal sources; shared sources and other sources. (ii) Besides the function of (de)legitimation, evidentiality can also be used to normalize the speaker's ideology. (iii) Shared sources of evidentials reflect the speaker's ideological bias, because they encode the speaker's presupposition of authority, facts, or shared knowledge. (iv) Personal sources of evidentials mean that the speaker is more willing to take verbal responsibility. (v) Other sources of evidentials reflect the speaker's lower responsibility for the information he/she offered. (vi) The use of the three evidential sources reflects the speakers' different responsibilities for their propositions and reveals their subjective or intersubjective stance.