A Study On The Evidentiality Of Diplomatic Discourse From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Pragmatics

As a universal linguistic phenomenon,evidentiality exists widely in human communication activities,and its concrete manifestation is evidential(Yang,2013),which is used to clarify the source of information conveyed by the speaker and the speaker’s judgment on the reliability of propositional information.Since Hu Zhuanglin(1994)introduced the concept of evidentiality into China for the first time,the research in this field has achieved relatively fruitful results.However,previous studies have focused on the analysis of evidentiality in English editorials,advertisements,academic discourses and political speeches,while the study of evidentiality in diplomatic discourse is relatively weak.Evidentiality is an important representation of diplomatic discourse,which is ubiquitous in all kinds of diplomatic discourse,such as press conferences and press conferences at home and abroad,and is a new indicator to evaluate the professionalism of spokespersons and journalists.This study intends to analyze various evidentiality phenomena in diplomatic style from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.This study selects two representative types of diplomatic discourse,namely,regular press conference and emergency press conference,as corpus sources,describes various forms of linguistic evidentiality in the two types of corpus from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,and analyzes interpersonal meanings reflected behind different forms.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)What are the manifestations of linguistic evidentiality in diplomatic language?(2)What are the similarities and differences between regular press conferences and emergency press conferences?(3)What interpersonal functions can different types of evidential achieve in diplomatic discourse?This study mainly adopts the research method of combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis.The corpus collection began in January 2020 and ended in August 2020,lasted for 8 months.A total of 906 Q&A discourses were collected from113 press conferences.After collecting the corpus,we compare the usage of data in routine press conferences and emergency press conferences,and use the chi-square test in SPSS to analyze the data.According to the characteristics of the corpus,this study analyzes the corpus in diplomatic discourse from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.This thesis studies the interpersonal meaning of linguistic evidentiality in foreign language by taking regular press conferences and emergency press conferences as examples.It is found that there are four types of common evidential used by spokesmen:sensory evidential,reporting evidential,inference evidential and belief evidential.Belief evidential and report evidential appear most frequently in the two types of diplomatic discourse.The high-frequency use of belief evidential is helpful to show the friendly interactive communication between China and the world,while the high-frequency use of reporting data is helpful to ensure the authenticity and timeliness of diplomatic discourse and reflect the serious and responsible working attitude of diplomatic departments.There are obvious differences between the frequency of regular press conferences and the frequency of emergency press conferences,The frequency of reporting evidential in regular press conferences is relatively low,however,the frequency of reporting evidential in emergency press conferences is relatively high.It’s found that the appearance of this phenomenon may be attributed to the particularity and urgency of the emergency press conference,and the government must inform the public of the ins and outs of the incident and the countermeasures to be adopted at the first time.At the press conference,the spokesman expressed his views on some events and expressed his country’s position to achieve the purpose of maintaining his country’s international image and international relations,besides answering reporters’ questions,speakers can choose different types of evidential to realize four interpersonal functions: expressing speakers’ emotional attitude,alienating the distance between information,alleviating face threats and realizing interactive communication.From the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,this study analyzes the interpersonal meaning behind the evidentiality of foreign language,which not only clarifies the practical value of evidentiality in the analysis of linguistic phenomena,but also provides a new perspective for future research in this field..