A Comparative Study Of The Construction Of China’s And The Usa’s National Images In Political Discourse From The Perspective Of Discourse-historical Approach

This study mainly uses Discourse-historical approach to make a comparative study of the construction of national image between China and the U.S.in Report on the Work of the Government(RWG)and State of the Union Address(SUA).RWGs and SUAs are the most representative political discourse of constructing the national images.This paper aims to analyze the similarities and differences between the two countries’ national images construction,discursive strategies and explain the leading factors that affect the national image construction,so as to help the readers better interpret RWG and SUA from the perspective of linguistics.The data of this paper is selected from RWGs and SUAs from 2017 to 2020,a total number of 8.RWG’s word tokens are 34,571 and the word types are 4,269.The SUA’s word tokens are 23,036 and the word types are 3,581.Firstly,the author uses the corpus software Ant Conc to analyze the national image of China and the U.S.by using the keywords,most frequent words and frequent collocations in 8 texts.Secondly,the author selects 42 examples from them and focuses on the three dimensions of Discourse-historical approach: content,discursive strategies and the language representation of the text to explore the national images constructed by the discourse,and make a qualitative analysis to explain the discursive strategies of national images.Finally,the paper analyzes the leading factors that influence the similarities and differences in discourse strategies.This study aims to solve the following three research questions:(1)What are the national images constructed in the RWGs and SUAs?(2)What are the similarities and differences in their use of discursive strategies?(3)What are the leading factors for these similarities and differences?The research shows that the Chinese government has constructed hard-working,peace-loving,people-centered and opening-up national images of China,and emphasized the process of self-construction.The U.S.government has constructed a great,inclusive,safe and free national image of the U.S.While constructing its own national images,the U.S.has also strengthened its internal unity and stability by constructing other countries as enemies.Through the analysis of discourse strategies,it is found that there are some similarities in the use of discursive strategies between China and the U.S.For the purpose of constructing the positive image of the country,both China and the U.S.use personal pronouns,special sentence patterns and metaphors to construct “in-group membership” in the construction strategy,and both countries use topoi of number to show their achievements and make them more convincing;use a large number of adverbs and parallelism in the strategy of perpetuation to make the report more appealing,and use a large number of predicate in the strategy of transformation to build a positive national image.However,due to the different socio-political,historical and cultural backgrounds of the two countries,the U.S.also uses destructive strategies and strategies of justification.This study has some practical significance.First of all,Discourse-historical approach can enhance people’s understanding and critical awareness of the political discourse as RWGs and SUAs.Secondly,this study helps to demonstrate the applicability of Discourse-historical approach in the comparative study of Chinese and American political discourse.Third,the study enriches the critical analysis of political discourses and helps to enhance readers’ understanding of China’s international images.