National Image Modeling Through Political Leaders’Discourse

In an age of globalization, national image has a profound impact on a nation’s politics, foreign affairs and business. As a result, every country has taken actions to model its national images in recent years and the topic of national image modeling has aroused great interest among scholars at home and abroad. So far, however, many achievements are mainly in the field of communication and international relations, and little academic research has been conducted to analyze national image modeling from the perspective of linguistics. As a matter of fact, language plays an important role in the modeling of national images. On the other hand, language use has a close relationship with social psychology, and so a systematic analysis of the linguistic aspect of national image modeling in light of social psychological pragmatics is of profound explanatory power on the issue.National image modeling is a complex system, which includes the efforts for image modeling on the part of the government, enterprises and the common people. The image of the national government is the most important component of national images, so the modeling of government images plays a key role in the national image modeling. On the other hand, political leaders are the representatives of the government and their discourses can obviously be used to model the government images and in turn to model the national images. In this thesis, a systematic analysis of national image modeling through political leaders’discourse is conducted from the perspective of the social psychological pragmatics.Social psychological pragmatics is a recently emerging sub-discipline of pragmatics, which is assumed in this thesis to consist of three major theories, i.e. Leech’s Politeness Principle, Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory, and Giles’s Speech Accommodation Theory. The Speech Accommodation Theory is based on the four theories of social psychology, i.e. similarity-attraction, social exchange, causal attribution, and intergroup distinctiveness, and the Politeness Principle and the Face Theory are closely related with social psychology. The integrated framework of the three theories can explicate why political leaders choose certain linguistic expressions to construct national images. In other words, the three major theories of social psychological pragmatics can reveal what psychological factors influence political leaders’discourse to achieve their goal in national image modeling.This thesis is organized in five chapters. After the introductory chapter covering the background, objective and significance of the thesis, Chapter Two reviews the existing literature on national images, political leaders’discourse and social psychological pragmatics. In Chapter Three, the theoretical framework of this project, i.e. social psychological pragmatics, is presented, which is postulated to consist of three major theories, namely, the Politeness Principle, the Face Theory, and the Speech Accommodation Theory. Then in Chapter Four, the above three theories of social psychological pragmatics are applied in a comprehensive analysis of political leaders’ discourse with an aim to expound the important role such discourses may play in national image modeling. The concluding chapter summarizes the major findings of the research, then acknowledges its limitations and finally makes some prospect for further research.