The Discourse Space Construction Of Cooperative Diplomatic Discourse

In the traditional discourse studies of politics,there are two broad strands:on the one hand,politics is viewed as a struggle for power between those who seek to assert and maintain power and those who seek to resist it;on the other hand,politics is viewed as cooperation for resolving clashes of interests(Chilton&Schaffner 2002).As an integral field of political discourse studies,the research of diplomatic discourse mainly investigates how a country's discourse in the diplomatic practices review and construct its diplomatic ideology and the social reality of international politics.Based on the two above-mentioned strands,diplomatic discourse can be considered as consisting of conflictual discourse and cooperative discourse,with the former as the studying focus for long while the latter remaining underexplored to some extent.From the perspective of spatial conceptualization in cognitive linguistics,cooperative diplomatic discourse is supposed to be different from conflictual one in the spatial representations,with Chilton(2004)'s Discourse Space Theory,which conceptualizes space as inside/outside dichotomy,only accounting for the latter instead of the former.The study aims at exploring the discourse space construction of cooperative diplomatic discourse with Chinese Heheism discourses as examples.In view of the limitation to conceptualize space in the binary way,the study incorporate the basic three dimensions proposed by Chilton(2004)and the discourse-space approach proposed by Kaal(2012,2015,2017)to come up with an adapted Space-Time-Value(STV)model for the analysis of Chinese Heheism discourse,trying to expand the study of discourse space to involve cooperative discourse.Three major research questions are to be addressed:(1)How do Chinese Heheism discourses represent in terms of space,time and value?(2)What kind of discourse space have Chinese Heheism discourses constructed?How do the three dimensions interact and contribute to the overall construction of discourse space?(3)How is cooperative diplomatic discourse different from conflictual one in terms of the discourse space constructed?To answer these research questions,the study takes Chinese President Xi Jinping's 68 foreign speeches as examples and follows a bottom-up analytic procedure of "text analysis-spatial representations-discourse space model".The data is mainly analyzed qualitatively,with quantitative analysis carried out to yield necessary supporting evidence.The major findings are:(1)On the space dimension,Chinese Heheism discourses establish an all-inclusive spatial representation,signifying harmonious coexistence of different countries and cultures.On the time dimension,Chinese Heheism discourses display a full-range temporal representation extending from now both retrospectively and prospectively,indicating the grand historical consideration and far-reaching sight of Chinese diplomacy.On the value dimension,the common value orientation is reflected not only through spatial and temporal representation,but also through varied value-laden construal operations.(2)The Heheism discourse-space model is formed to visualize the extensive and inclusive feature of Chinese Heheism discourses,in which the three dimensions interact in a pairwise way with the value dimension as the core.(3)Cooperative diplomatic discourse is different from conflictual diplomatic discourse in that the former,oriented to seek for common value among different countries,constructs extensive and inclusive discourse space with global spatial representation,while the latter,guided by antagonistic value judgement,constructs dichotomous inward-moving discourse space with inside/outside binary spatial conceptualization.The study contributes to the theoretical enrichment of discourse space analysis with the transformation of Chilton(2004)'s three-dimensional framework and the formation of the Heheism discourse-space model.By putting cooperative discourse on a par with conflictual discourse,it also contributes to extend the scope of the practice of discourse space analysis,which bridges the gap that the previous discourse space studies have been largely restricted to conflictual political discourse.The findings are significant for the practices of political discourse analysis,diplomatic discourse translation as well as the construction of China's discourse system for international communication.