A Critical Cognitive Linguistic Study Of China’s Discursive Representation In National Security Strategy Of The United States Of America

Language is inextricably bound with politics,and a certain ideology is reflected behind the language.Political discourse plays an important role in publicizing political ideas,forming public opinion guidance and building public psychology models.In political discourse,the politician will skillfully use various language skills and strategies to achieve the purpose of influencing and controlling the audience’s ideology.Political discourse,such as political speech in the United States,plays an important role in the process of policy promulgation,implementation and strategy adjustment.The publication of the “National Security Strategy Report” is the statutory responsibility of each president of the United States,which embodies the strategic thinking of each administration,and exerts a great influence on the US government’s policies and measures in the fields of diplomacy,military,and security.Since September 11 attack in 2001,the U.S.government has issued five national security strategy reports,which to some extent reflects the adjustment trend of the U.S.national security strategy,as well as the change of the American policies towards China and the Sino-US relations.In view of this,this paper analyzes the discourse space and China’s location in the spaces constructed by the five National Security Strategy Report of the U.S.issued by American Presidents in 2002,2006,2010,2015 and 2017 in an attempt to explore how reports successfully legalize their policies and measures through discourse strategies.Critical discourse analysis aims to reveal the implied ideology and the dialectical relationship between language and ideology through the analysis of public discourse,which is one of the important perspectives in the study of public discourse.In recent years,critical discourse analysis has made great achievements in interdisciplinary research.Critical cognitive linguistics attracts intense scholarly interest because of its effective complementation for traditional research methods.Based on Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory and Cap’s Proximization Theory,this thesis analyzes the discourse space constructed in the reports and China’s positions in the discourse spaces,and probes into the ideology hidden in the national security strategy report.Then this thesis explores how the report controls the discourse to manipulate the audience’s ideology from a cognitive perspective.The research findings suggest that China’s position in the reports has been changed from partner to challenger or rival.By further investigating the proximization strategy used in the report of the Trump in 2017,we find that the report intentionally arouses the audiences’ psychological space for the phobia of external threats and strengthens the rationality andlegitimacy of their own behavior so that the “America First” foreign policy can be successfully legitimized.These findings may help readers better understand the use of language strategies in political discourse,reveal its processes that influence and control the ideology of the audience,so as to critically interpret political discourse and understand the real intention behind language.