Research On The Construction Of China’s National Images In Diplomatic Question And Answer Discourses

With the improvement of China’s comprehensive national strength and economic status,China has played an increasingly significant role on the international stage.In order to take a comprehensive view of China’s national images,this paper explores them from a more authoritative way.As the mouthpiece of a country and government,the foreign ministry spokespersons are representatives of expressing and elaborating the political stance and attitude of the country and government.Discourses can represent the external images that a country aspires to convey.Correspondingly,journalists who raise questions to foreign ministry spokespersons come from distinct countries around the world,representing the stance and attitude of the national media intuitively.Discourses from them also reflect the overall impression of other countries on China’s national images.Whatever,there are always differences between the national images of China from the viewpoint of foreign journalists and foreign ministry spokespersons,which is worth studying.The research corpus selected is the diplomatic question and answer discourses in the year 2022 on the official website,Regular Press Conference of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China,focusing on contents related to China.This paper analyzes discursive strategies and discursive devices as well as analyze their linguistic forms so as to explore how the national images of China is constructed by different speakers.This paper applies Discourse-Historical Approach put forward by Ruth Wodak.The collected corpus is analyzed with the assistance of five strategies,namely,nomination strategies,predication strategies,argumentation strategies,perspectivization strategies and intensification strategies.Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods,to begin with,it analyzes the overall distributions of five discursive strategies and discursive devices in the corpus.What’s more,it takes discursive strategies as center to examine the linguistic forms used to build China’s national images and finally,explore China’s national images created by diplomatic discourses.This paper focuses on exploring and answering the following questions:(1)What are the distributions of discursive strategies in diplomatic question and answer discourses?(2)What are the characteristics of linguistic forms reflecting discursive strategies?(3)What kinds of national images of China have been constructed through these different linguistic forms of discourses? Through the research,this paper draws the following conclusions:(1)The discursive strategies applied by foreign journalists and foreign ministry spokespersons are almost identical,including five discursive strategies mentioned above.However,no mitigation strategies are adopted.Each of discursive strategies and realizations is as follows.In terms of foreign journalists,there are three types of devices in nomination strategies: noun phrases,official names and metaphors.There are three types of devices in predication strategies: explicit predicates,evaluation attribution of negative or positive traits as well as explicit or implicit comparisons.The application of topoi in argumentation strategies is relatively abundant,with a total of 10 types,such as danger and threat,uselessness/disadvantage,etc.There are three types of devices in perspectivization strategies,indirect speech,direct speech and quotation marks.There are three types of sources of indirect speech and direct speech: specific and exact sources,vague and implicit sources and unspecific sources.According to their sources,there are seven types: government officials,international organizations(or relevant personnels),etc.There are five types of devices in intensification strategies:diminutives,augmentatives,parallel structures,progressive forms and prepositional phrases.With regard to foreign ministry spokespersons,there are four types of devices in nomination strategies: personal pronouns,noun phrases,metaphors and spatial references.There are five types of devices in predication strategies: explicit predicates,evaluation attribution of positive or negative traits,predicate nouns,explicit or implicit comparisons and predicate adjectives;There are 15 types of topoi in argumentation strategies,such as usefulness/advantage,numbers,etc.;There are three types of devices in perspectivization strategies: indirect speech,direct speech and quotation marks.Among them,there are two sources of indirect speech and direct speech: specific and exact sources as well as vague and implicit sources.According to their sources,there are four specific types: political officials,nations or national governments,official reports or documents and international investigations or votes.There are five types of devices in intensification strategies: diminutives,parallel structures,rhetorical questions,conditional forms and hyperboles.(2)The linguistic forms employed by foreign ministry spokespersons and foreign journalists in order to construct China’s national images involve both phrases and sentences,which are kinds of more complete expressions.When it comes to the specific uses,there are both similarities and differences.The following are special details.In terms of foreign journalists,from a functional perspective,phrases are divided into noun phrases and verb phrases.From a structural perspective,there are deviant phrases,coordinative phrases,infinitive phrases and predicate-object phrases.In terms of sentences,simple sentences,compound sentences,and complex sentences are applied.Simple sentences include interrogative sentences,declarative sentences and imperative sentences of commands.Furthermore,compound sentences include progressive,transitional and juxtaposed compound sentences.Complex sentences involve adverbial clauses,object clauses of verb,restrictive attributive clauses,appositive clauses and subjective clauses.In terms of foreign ministry spokespersons,from a functional perspective,phrases are classified as nominal phrases and predicative phrases.From a structural perspective,there are deviant phrases,predicate-object phrases,prepositional phrases,coordinative phrases,consecutive phrases and concurrent phrases.In terms of sentences,single and complex sentences are used.To be precise,single sentences include wh-questions,declarative sentences and imperative sentences of commands.In addition,compound sentences involve coordinate compound sentences and subordinate compound sentences.Coordinate compound sentences contain cause-effect compound sentences,concessive compound sentences,conditional compound sentences,juxtaposed compound sentences as well as purposive compound sentences.Subordinate compound sentences are classified as transitional compound sentences and progressive compound sentences.(3)As a whole,the national images of China finally portrayed by foreign journalists and foreign ministry spokespersons are divided into several types.Foreign journalists portray China as comprehensive infringers,threatening adversaries,ineffective performers and active contributors.Foreign ministry spokespersons portray China as active contributors,peaceful developers,responsible executors and innocent victims.It can be seen that the national images of China constructed by foreign journalists and foreign ministry spokespersons are three types.Some are different images,some are contrary images and the others are the same.Specifically,differences lie in that the national images of China constructed by foreign journalists include comprehensive infringers and threatening adversaries,while the national images of China constructed by foreign ministry spokespersons are peaceful developers and innocent victims.The contraries lie in foreign journalists highlighting national images of China as ineffective performers.By contrast,foreign ministry spokespersons underline the national images of China as responsible executors.The similarity lies in the fact that both foreign journalists and foreign ministry spokespersons portray China as active contributors.