Discursive Construction Of The Military Image In Crisis

With the Chinese military accelerating its pace in “going out”,shaping a good international image of the PLA is not only the answer to the military’s adherence to the policy of opening up to the outside world and building a world-class military,but also the manifestation of PLA’s international influence and soft power.This study attempts to explore the discursive construction of the military image from the perspective of Social Semiotics,and discusses the discursive strategy of military image building in the context of crisis by analyzing the image building practice of the US military in a crisis context.On theoretical aspect,this study reviews and summarizes current studies on military image building in the crisis context,in order to find the deficiencies of current researches.This study points out that few military image studies are situated in a crisis context or the context of intercultural communication.Moreover,military image studies lack the targeted research on the cognitive factors and emotional factors of image building.Therefore,more researches based on image building theories in Social Semiotics are needed.On practical aspect,this study is based on the fact that the Chinese military is vigorously promoting the cause of strengthening the military,enhancing its international influence and building the soft power of the Chinese military.This study investigates the strategic communication strategy put forward by the US military in the context of national security crisis,and conducts a case study of the US military’s image construction to provide inspiration for the image building of the Chinese military in future crisis context.This study focuses on the following questions:First,is Social Semiotics suitable for the study of military image construction in the crisis context? How to establish the analytical framework of image construction in the context of a crisis from the perspective of Social Semiotics?Second,in the context of a crisis,what semiotic strategies were used in the US military image construction? What kind of roles dis these strategies play respectively?Third,in the context of a crisis,what kind of discursive strategies were applied to respond to the crisis context and construct the connection between the US military image and the crisis?Fourth,what military images did the US military construct in the crisis context?Can the US military’s image building practice achieve the expected effect and be accepted and recognized by the target audience?Based on the above questions,this study takes Social Semiotics as the overall theoretical framework,integrating the image building systems of functional grammar,visual grammar and social actor theory,and establishes a hierarchical analytical framework of image building at the levels of social context,discourse semantics,and lexicogrammar.First,this study summarizes the relation between the metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)and the meta-elements of image construction.Based on the representation of human experience and the realization of interpersonal relationship by the metafunctions in SFL,this study establishes the image building system of words.By integrating the cognitive and emotional construction of the image subject with the representative meaning and interactive meaning in visual grammar,this study establishes the image building system of images.And the image building analytical framework at the lexico-grammatical level is completed with the above two systems combined.Second,as for the image building system at the discourse semantics level,the study integrates the recontextualization of social actors in social actors theory and the crisis response strategies,and constructs the image building analytical framework at the discourse semantics level.Finally,the above image building systems are placed at the level of social context to form an analytical framework of image building from the perspective of Social Semiotics.In the case study,the crisis of US basing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Japan serves as the social context.A 201-page promotional manga issued by the US Forces Japan(USFJ),as well as 699 Facebook posts by the USFJ during the stay of the aircraft carrier are selected as the research object,and based on which a small corpus is established.Corpus-assisted discourse analysis is used in the annotation and coding of the corpus to obtain descriptive data of the image building of USFJ using multimodal semiotic resources.USFJ mainly focuses on positive emotional construction and active cognitive construction.As for the discourse analysis of specific words and images in the corpus,this study adopts the image building framework of Social Semiotics to examine the role of the images and words in the emotional and cognitive construction of USFJ,and to analyze the image building strategies of USFJ.The findings of this study are as follows:The first is the applicability of the theory of Social Semiotics.In a crisis context,functional grammar and visual grammar are applied in the analysis of multimodal resources,while the elements in social practices are recontextualized.Social Semiotics is therefore,suitable for discursive construction of military image in the crisis context.The second is the image building semiotic strategy of the US military.The image semiotic resources elicit the audience empathy through close-range,contact images and naturalistic images,and achieves “objective representation” of the US military through observe images and unmediated images.The narrative images suggest the work and life of the US military,and the conceptual images suggest the character attributes of the US military and the relationship between Japan and the US.The words express the US military’s “love” to Japan through the affective semantic resources,while judgmental resources highlight the “strength” of the US military,and appreciative resources confirm the social value of the US military.The material process and relational process are used to explain respectively the role of the US military’s work and training,and the attributes and identities of the US military.The third is the recontextualization strategy of the crisis context of the US military.The US military has sidestepped the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier controversy by denying any link to the crisis.By offering compensation to the affected to build a reputation,and emphasizing the goodwill to minimize the damage,the US military has maintained a weak connection with the crisis and established a legitimate image.The selective construction of the US military’s image has been achieved by establishing positive relation between the US military and the crisis.The fourth is the discursively constructed images of the USFJ and its effect.Discourse strategies construct the “positive” images of USFJ as “professionals”,“friendly neighbors”,“loving families” and “security forces”.At the same time,this study also points out the differences between the “positive” images constructed by USFJ and their real thoughts and attitudes.From the perspective of intercultural communication,this study points out that the US military constructs its image mainly on the basis of its own cultural values,which makes it difficult for the Japanese audience to accept and recognize these images due to cultural differences.Therefore,the discursive construction of the US military’s image may not achieve the desired effect.This study provides the theoretical framework of Social Semiotics for the construction of military image in the theoretical level,and adopts the case of discursive construction of USFJ image as a reference in the practical level,so as to provide implications for the discursive construction of the Chinese military’s image in possible crisis context in the future.