| With the continuous advancement of globalization,positioning nation's identity properly is closely related to its international image and international competitiveness.A decent,appropriate and ideal nation's identity is the foundation for the effective dialogue between different countries and it can be constructed and expressed through certain discourse strategies.China,as an influential power,needs to show its role and status in the international community and it is also an urgent requirement for China's development to construct suitable nation's identity by the national discourse.As an important part of diplomatic activities,diplomatic remark is an important way to construct the nation's identity.In the remarks,the words indicating stance and attitude play an important role in the nation's identity construction if used properly.According to Hyland's Stance System,stance can be used to express speaker's commitment to the evaluation and attitude towards readers and stance markers are regarded as one of the language choices.Therefore,it is an effective way to explore the construction of nation's identity by analyzing stance markers in the spokespersons' remarks of the regular press conferences of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.The author of this thesis builds a corpus by collecting the research data from the spokesperson's remarks of the regular press conferences of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and all research materials are from the official website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.There are 267 regular press conferences in total(from May 1st 2017 to June 30 th 2018).The main research object is the stance markers indicating Chinese attitude toward domestic and foreign affairs.With Hyland's Stance System as the theoretical framework,the researcher combines Adaptation Theory to analyze the construction of nation's identity by the stance expressions from the spokespersons' remarks.This study mainly explores:(1)What kinds of stance markers are used by spokespersons to better construct the nation's identity ?(2)What types of nation's identities can be constructed by using stance markers?(3)What are the linguistic features reflected in the adaptation to the different nation's identities construction?(4)Do the social and cultural factors also play a role in the construction of nation's identity and how?By the self-built corpus,this study is mainly conducted from the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to count and analyze data by adopting corpus analysis techniques.The quantitative analysis mainly used corpus analysis techniques such as high-frequency words,keywords and collocates to show the spokespersons' different selection of stance markers.Thequalitative analysis method demonstrates and interprets the types of identity,the language features and the influential factors of the nation's identity construction through the Adaptation Theory and concordance.The research findings showed:(1)The spokespersons of the Chinese Foreign Ministry mainly use four types of stance markers,namely hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mention markers to construct the nation's identity in which boosters and attitude markers are the main language constructive means.(2)Through using different stance markers,the spokespersons mainly construct four kinds of nation's identities including the constructors of world order,peace-keeper,the contributor of the world economic development and the cooperator of the world common development.(3)In the adaptation to the different nation's identities construction,the variability,functionality and negotiability of language are found in the remarks of spokespersons.(4)In the process of nation's identities construction,the social and cultural factors also play a positive role.In the process of globalization and the increasing development of China,China's position and attitude need to be deeply understood by the international community.By analyzing and discussing the nation's identity construction of China by stance markers in the spokesperson's remarks of the regular press conferences of the Chinese Foreign Ministry,this study aims to provide a different research perspective and analysis method for the construction of national discourse system and identity construction.More importantly,this study also provide a reference about how our country's spokespersons rationally adopt effective discourse means and strategies to face and eliminate the adverse effects from international public opinions to enhance China's international discourse power and shape the international image of China as a “responsible power”. |
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