A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of National Defense White Papers Between China And The United States

National defense paper is published by a national government or council and boundwith white covers. It is another name for important document or report aboutnational defense affairs. As one of the most crucial types of political discourse, thefunction of national defense white paper is to declare national defense policy andmilitary strategy, guide the construction of national defense and army; render somethreats to achieve political objectives; present national defense power and implementmilitary deterrence; enhance military transparency and establish mutual trust;popularize the knowledge of national defense and strengthen national defenseeducation. Through the analysis of language use in national defense white papers, anation’s military development strategy and political thought can be better understood.This thesis aims to apply corpus-based analysis approaches to make a systematicfunctional discourse study of national white papers between China and the UnitedStates by comparing their textual features.Understanding discourse is a complex process of interaction between language andthought. Halliday’s systematic functional grammar provides an operative anduniversally applicable theoretical basis for this complex process. The application ofcorpus technology can be specified for the concordance, statistics and retrieval ofspecified categories of data in massive amounts of text. Through this approach, thequantitative analysis of textual features will be easily realized and thus relevantresearch results will be more objective. Therefore, this thesis mainly adopts theresearch paradigm of systematic functional discourse analysis based on corpus, beingguided by theories of systematic functional linguistics, applying corpus-based dataanalysis approaches to make a comparative study between China’s National WhitePaper and National Security Strategy of the United States. Firstly, theories ofmetafunction and context were introduced. Then the previous study of systematicfunctional discourse analysis and corpus-based discourse analysis were reviewed,through which the necessity, scientificity and feasibility of this study are made clear.Secondly, it selected China’s National White Paper in2006,2008,2010and National Security Strategy of the United States in2006,2008,2010as the researchmaterials and the corpus of national defense white papers of China and the UnitedStates in the period of2006-2010were constructed. Thirdly, based on this corpus, acomparative study of defense white papers between China and the United Statesfrom the three perspectives of ideational function, interpersonal function and textualfunction were made. It is found that there exist obvious differences in textualfeatures of national defense white papers between China and the United States fromthe perspective of language features including word choosing, tenor, modality andfrom the perspective of textual construction including cohesion and coherence ofdiscourse, distribution of central content. In the end, in view of these differences intextual features, a further discussion about the causes of these differences wascarried out. And the result proves that social factors, culture differences and ways ofthinking all play a decisive role in the textual construction of national defensedocuments.This study adopts the discourse analysis approach based on corpus technology,which effectively combines corpus research methods and functional discourseanalysis and has important research value for discourse analysis of political texts. Inaddition, the corpus analysis approach based on computer application technologyproposed in this thesis is beneficial to make qualitative and functional interpretationfor a large amount of linguistic features which is of great significance for futureresearch on discourse analysis.