A Functional Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And British National Defense White Papers

National defense white paper is not only an important document to publicize a country's idea of national defense and guide its construction,but also a significant channel for different countries to increase mutual trust,promote communication and realize political purposes.As Britain and America scored a first by being the first to make their defense report known to the public and the international community since World War II,it attracts a growing attention from scholars.But most of their studies chiefly deal with its interpretation.Linguistic studies concerned principally focus on CDA,corpus analysis,and analysis of C-E translation between Chinese and American or between Chinese and Australian national defense white papers.There are few studies based on SFL and much fewer on Chinese and British NDWPs.Halliday(1994/2009a)points out that one of the characteristics of SFL is to show language features in context of situation and context of culture from the perspective of social culture and that one of his aims of constructing SFG is to provide theoretical framework for discourse analysis.Hence,this thesis adopts theory of SFL to make a contrast between CNDWP and BNDWP to explore their language features,probe into similarities and differences in their ways of meaning expression from the perspective of ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning and textual meaning,and reveal possible reasons for them.To ensure comparability and contrastive significance,this research selects two pieces of text similar in content and structure from the official website of the Ministry of National Defense of China and Britain to do the contrastive study by using Halliday's meta-function theory with a methodology of integrating quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis.Firstly,transitivity,voice,modality,mood,and patterns of thematic progression are discriminated and counted,and relevant tables are formed.Then some examples are used to prove their similarities and differences.Lastly,cultural reasons for their differences will be explored.And the major findings are concluded as follows:(1)Both CNDWP and BNDWP attach great importance to the application of language function.(2)In terms of ideational function,they share great similarities.Both of them chiefly employ material processes and relational processes,and material process has absolute advantage.Besides,they also use a small number of mental processes.Both of them give priority to active voice but passive voice is used occasionally in BNDWP due to habits of expression.(3)In terms of interpersonal function,both of them pay attention to use reasonable modality to convey interactive relationship between the country and the public,but they choose different modal value.BNDWP prefers to use modal expressions with median and low value,while CNDWP tends to use modal expressions with high value.They also share some similarities in the selection of mood and tense.Although negative form and past tense are used more frequently in CNDWP than that in BNDWP and future tense is used more frequently in BNDWP than that in CNDWP,both of them give priority to declarative mood and present tense.(4)In terms of textual function,BNDWP is developed by diversified and compound mode,not only making full use of the four basic patterns,but also creating a new type.However,CNDWP is mainly presented by relatively unitary pattern of parallel/radiant type and other types are nearly not employed.(5)Their similarities are attributed to the similar expression purposes of national defense text.Their differences are ascribed to their different values and mode of thinking.China advocates collectivism and its mode of thinking is introvert,retrospective and convergent,whereas Britain emphasizes liberalism and its mode of thinking is extrovert,prospective and divergent.This research makes people understand national defense text from a new perspective,provides favorable reference for its translation and offers implication for language teaching and learning,namely in the process of language teaching and learning,cultural factors should be processed simultaneously.At last,it once again proves the feasibility and availability of meta-function theory.