A Study Of The Strategies Adopted In The Country Identity Construction Of U.S.Official Discourses On Foreign Wars

Language and identity construction is among the hot topics discussed in recent years. However, studies on official discourses and country identity construction seem to have been unreasonably neglected. As is known to all, in the field of foreign policy, the United States always has the tradition of interventionism. It plays a role of“international police” in the international arena and constantly launches military wars,or enforces economic sanctions on some countries. However, in the U.S. official discourses on foreign wars, a variety of strategies are adopted to construct a good international image and avoid the fact of intervention. This research will try to examine some U.S. official discourses on foreign wars to explore how the U. S. constructs a good country identity through linguistic means and pragmatic strategies.60 official speeches by U.S. presidents and spokesmen on foreign wars collected from White House Website are used as the corpus for this study. It attempts to answer the following two questions:1) What kinds of linguistic means are adopted in the official discourses to construct a good country identity of the United States?2) What kinds of pragmatic strategies are adopted in the official discourses to construct a good country identity of the United States?This study shows that, in linguistic level, the choices of commendatory and derogatory terms, as well as personal pronouns, mood and modal auxiliaries all exhibit remarkable characteristics, the purpose of which is to highlight and promote the values of democracy, peace and freedom. Thus, a good country identity is constructed successfully.The study also finds that, a variety of pragmatic strategies are adopted in these U.S.official speeches on foreign wars, including selecting favorable examples, choosing pragmatic vagueness, expressing views by a third party, avoiding the crucial point andtransferring the focusing point. These pragmatic strategies are beneficial to cover up the fact of interference and establish an image of humanitarian for the United States.This study does some preliminary research on how to construct country identity through linguistic means and pragmatic strategies. It will broaden the scope of language study to a certain extent.