Engagement Resources In Diplomatic Discourse

In the context of enhancing China's international discourse power,regular press conference is believed to serve as a carrier of communicative activity where interlocutors exchange values and negotiate attitudes.Appraisal Theory is acknowledged to be an improved description of interpersonal meaning which is informed by Systemic Function Linguistics.Particularly,the Engagement System under this theory principally serves to examine how authorial stance and dialogistic characteristics are constructed in the interpersonal activity of communication.This thesis,aims to investigate how spokespersons voice their stance and even align themselves with actual or potential audiences when dealing with US-China trade friction issues.So an quantitative and qualitative analysis based on Appraisal Theory is conducted to unveil the dialogistic characteristics of responses from spokespersons in China's regular press conference by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.This study uses a self-built corpus which consists of trade war related discourse in dialogues between journalists and spokespersons.It is collected from the official website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs,China,within the time span from August 14^th,2017 to August 20^th,2018.The corpus of 141 responses,with a size of 24,818 words,is annotated manually conforming to Engagement sub-system realizations with the aid of UAM CorpusTool 3.3p.The distributions of Engagement sub-type frequency were calculated with tables representing ranks of each category from perspectives of formulation and device.It reveals that dialogical contractive resources are dominantly employed accounting for 64.29%,yet expansive strategies also enjoyed considerable proportion of 35.71%.Based on the qualitative case analysis,the functionality of Engagement linguistic choices in shaping the dialogistic property and authorial stance are elaboratively discussed.Through discussion,it is found that on the one hand,the data tends to be contractive in terms of leaving dialogical space and allowing opposite positions.While on the other hand,room for evoking certain alternatives is saved in a modest style so as to eliminate the tension and maintain consultable condition.So the study concludes that dialogistic balance is carefully managed in the examined corpus and its Engagement strategies are believed to realize three interpersonal purposes:fact construction,stance declaration and negotiation environment management.As a tentative research,the present study indicates the potential of extending the application scope of Appraisal Theory to diplomatic discourse.With a detailed elaboration of research method and Engagement Framework identification,this research would serve as an operational reference for following scholars.Finally,through generalizing the pattern of Engagement strategies in spokesperson discourse,it is expected to bring implications for China to strive for discourse power in diplomatic activities.