Research On Rhetoric In Xi Jinping's Speeches On The Belt And Road Initiative

The world today is undergoing complicated and profound changes.In order to cope with the complex development environment at home and abroad,President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative of jointly building the Belt and Road.As the initiator of the Belt and Road Initiative,Xi Jinping used a large number of rhetorical devices in the series of speeches,forming a unique “Xi's style discourse”.It provides much valuable enlightenment for the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative discourse system.As we know,rhetoric and politics have been inextricably linked since ancient times.The current academic research on rhetorical devices used in political discourse is mainly conducted from the perspectives of stylistics,translation,sociolinguistics,systemic-functional linguistics and rhetoric,in which the pragmatic and semantic features of rhetorical devices are discussed.Besides,based on the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,some scholars also explored the cognitive mechanism of rhetoric by integrating different theoretical models,but such research achievements are relatively few.In view of this,this thesis attempts to adopt a combining method of both quantitative and qualitative analysis.Taking the rhetorical devices used in Xi Jinping's series of speeches on the Belt and Road Initiative as the research object,this study self-builds a closed corpus and classifies different figures of speech.Taking van Dijk's Sociocognitive Discourse Analysis model and theories of Cognitive Rhetoric as the theoretical background,this study sets up a Critical Cognitive Rhetoric model and conducts a series of case studies to explore the cognitive mechanism of different rhetorical devices and dig out the social cognitive connotations behind them.This study finds that the figure of speech is not only a form of linguistic expression,but also a social cognitive activity.Firstly,the cognitive process of figures of speech in political discourse is related to human's construal operations and emotional experience.In the shared social and political context,people's cognition of the expression form and content of figures of speech will be elaborated and highlighted,thus evoking emotions appropriate for a certain political purpose of motivating social action.Secondly,rhetorical figures in political discourse are social-context dependent and construct the viewpoints and ideology of the audience based on embodied experience and entrenched sociocultural knowledge.Thirdly,the rhetorical devices used in Xi Jinping's speeches on the Belt and Road Initiative have shaped the values and ideologies that are compatible with the core value system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.The significance of this research is as follows.Theoretically,the Critical Cognitive Rhetoric model makes up for the deficiency of the research on rhetorical figures in Sociocognitive Discourse Analysis model,thus providing a new method for the research on rhetoric in political discourse.Practically,the exploration of the social cognitive connotations implied in the national leaders' speeches is not only conducive to reshaping China's national image and enhancing China's voice on the world stage,but also provides enlightenment for the construction of the Belt and Road discourse system and even the political discourse system with Chinese characteristics.