A Study On Metadiscourse In Evasions By Foreign Ministry Spokesperson On China-US Trade Friction

Trade friction is one of the most important issues between China and the United States.Since the presidency of Donald Trump in January 2017,the two countries have witnessed a new round of frictions,also the largest one in history.Faced with the fierce conflict of national interests,the regular press conference of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China,as a window for the Chinese government to interpret official positions,still sees a frequent occurrence of evasive replies to the issue.Evasion is the intended semantic irrelevance between the answer and question.The thesis scrutinized the transcripts of the MFA press conferences(2017.01-2019.09)to collect all Q&As on China-US trade frictions.Under the framework of Dou and Zhang's typology of evasions and Hyland's metadiscourse model,the study investigated selected evasive answers to figure out the metadiscourse features and strategies the MFA spokespersons used and their intentions behind such strategies.The study was done in both quantitative and qualitative approaches.Its major findings are presented as follow.Evasion is a prominent feature of the genre,regular press conferences,with more than half of related questions evaded by the spokespeople;10 subcategories of metadiscourse elements all appear in the research material,and the use of interactional metadiscourse markers is significantly more than interactive ones with engagement markers and self-mentions ranked top one and two.A response with greater semantic irrelevance would be characterized with more interactional metadiscourse resources to avoid face-threats.However,face-saving is not the only purpose of evasion.Above all,through such semantic irrelevance,the spokesperson took the initiative on this issue,used various metadiscourse strategies to enhance interaction at two levels and won understanding and support from the international community.At the same time,they intended to promote the awareness of a community with a shared future for mankind,and construct international discursive power of China.