A Pragma-dialectical Study Of Personal Attack In The Spokespersons’ Replies At Chinese Foreign Ministry Press Conferences

Chinese foreign ministry press conference is one of the most critical channels through which the Beijing government releases information on diplomatic activity,clarifies China’s domestic and foreign policy, and explains China’s position on major global issues to the international public. In addition, it is a crucial information source from which foreign media reports on China’s domestic and foreign affairs. In response to questions from journalists, the spokesperson should take possible doubts or disagreements into account before justifying or refuting the claims posed. From this perspective, the spokesperson’s reply is a typical argumentative discourse, where the proponent is the spokesperson and the opponents are likely to be the reporters and international audiences who query or oppose the spokesman’s position. When facing some sensitive issues, such as issues of territorial sovereignty, human right, trade dispute and so on, the spokesperson often adopts personal attacks to refute the opponent’s arguments or to hold his own position better. That is to say, by denigrating the opponent’s character, spokesperson can deny or query the arguments or standpoints of the opponent. To date, few scholars pay enough attention to the personal attack and explore it from the argumentative perspective. Given this, under the framework of Pragma-Dialectics, this paper analyzes and evaluates the personal attacks frequently used by spokespersons, taking 2864 spokespersons’ replies at Chinese foreign ministry press conferences from 2012 to 2015 as the research data.The research results show that, the spokespersons often adopt three variants of personal attacks, namely, abusive personal attack, circumstantial personal attack, and You Too, to cut down the credibility of the opponents, attempting to dismiss them in the discussion. The abusive variant can be categorized into four subtypes: attacking person with bad character, attacking person with bad faith, attacking person with low intelligence, and attacking person with low expertise. By contrast, the circumstantial variant can be divided into two subtypes: attacking person with suspicious motives,and attacking person with suspicious interests. In addition, the You Too variant can befurther divided into four subtypes: inconsistency between one’s words and actions,inconsistency between one’s past and present actions, inconsistency between one’s past and present words, and only words and no actions.According to the institutional preconditions of Chinese foreign ministry press conference and the context-independent soundness criteria for personal attacks, this study devises the context-dependent soundness criteria for personal attacks in the spokespersons’ replies. The soundness criteria contain the following critical questions:whether the personal attack is true; whether the personal attack is relevant to the opponent’s standpoint; whether the language of using the personal attack is radical;whether the personal attack slanders the opponent; and whether the personal attack infringes on the opponent’s fame. According to this context-dependent soundness criteria, this study evaluates whether the personal attacks as the research objects in this paper are reasonable or not. The results show that spokesperson may commit fallacies of depicting the opponent as irresponsible, unintelligent, disloyal or unprofessional, of casting suspicion on the opponent’s interest, and of pointing out a contradiction in the opponent’s words and deeds.This study has implications in both theoretical and practical aspects. In theory,this study researches the spokespersons’ replies from the argumentative perspective,thus it can provide a new research angle for studying the spokespersons’ replies.Moreover, this study devises the critical questions to assess the reasonableness of the personal attack. This new evaluation method can be applied to the formulation of the soundness criteria for other types of language strategies. In practice, this study can give spokesperson some practical guidance on how to use the personal attack both reasonably and effectively. When spokesperson uses this argument, not only should he consider the effectiveness, but also should take the institutional constraints into account to achieve the reasonableness.