Democratic And Authoritarian:Context Model And National Identity In Political Discourse

Starting from 1977, United States Department of State issues a Human Rights Report every year, which includes almost 200 countries and regions in the world. Linguistically, the Human Rights Report is a kind of political text with similar topics and style. Besides, the report is issued for the pursuit of huma n rights, so it is of political ideology. The issue of Human Rights Report by the United States causes an immediate sensation in the world. At present, the Human Rights Report has become a special political phenomenon.Based on the context model theory proposed by Van Dijk and taking UK and DPRK as the examples, this study carries out a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of the discursive construction of different national identities in Human Rights Reports. In Human Rights Report, DPRK and UK are described as a democratic country and an authoritarian state respectively. Therefore, the study of the two different national identities construction can give a general image of how the democratic country and authoritarian country are constructed in political discourse.The analysis to the context models the United States constructed for UK and DPRK manifests the following findings which are also supported and verified by the corpus techniques: the frequency, the clusters and the concordances. Firstly, UK is presented as a democratic country, obeying the law, respecting human rights, pursing equality and protecting the weak while DPRK is described as a rather closed and authoritarian country, ignoring the law, controlling the people and depriving of human rights. Secondly, it is the ideology, values and social relations that account for the different national identities in human rights reports by analyzing UK context model and DPRK context model America constructed when writing human rights reports. Similar national identity, ideology and good relations between UK and US contribute to construct a positive context model in the mind of the United States. Different national identities, opposite ideologies and bad relations between DPRK and the U.S. result in a negative context model in the mind of the United States. It suggests that the United States divides the countries into two groups based on national identity and social ideology: the country that stands similarities with it and the country that differs from it. And the United States seeks sameness while excludes differences. Thirdly, according to Van Dijk(1998), context models ongoingly and dynamically control the discourse production. Language users tend to adopt rhetorical devices to shape language appropriate to the context model constraints of the communicative action. In Human Rights Report, writers employ the following rhetorical devices to highlight the democracy of UK and authoritarian DPRK : overstatement and understatement; the choice of conjunction words: and or however; the number game; lexical repetition; and indirect expressions.The study verifies Van Dijk's context model. Hopefully, the study can provide a novel methodology and a new perspective for the study of national identity construction and human rights reports as well as help people increase their critical linguistic awareness.