A Discourse Space Theory Driven And Corpus Based Study Of American Imagery Of China

This thesis applies a cognitively motivated discourse theory, Discourse Space Theory, to uncover the national image of China encoded in the American political discourse, to wit, Obama’s political remarks on China. Within an integrated research framework—the corpus tool for quantitative analysis and discourse space theory for qualitative analysis—this thesis answers two research questions:(1) what kind of national image is constructed in Obama’s remarks on China?(2) What discursive strategies are employed in the mental representation process?The analysis of the data is conducted from the aspects of personal dexis, temporal dexis and modal dexis accordingly. There are four salient linguistic features of Obama’s remarks on China: the overuse of the first person plural, belief space, and positive epistemic modality, and possessive construction and possession predicates around the keyword China. Besides, two discursive strategies are mainly employed, viz., proximization and presupposition. China is pictured positive explicitly while such image is not located in the reality space, or in the deictic center(here-now-real) of the speaker. What accords with the truth held by the U.S. is that China’s rise is suspicious and China is not performing due responsibility in international affairs such as climate change and world economies.