An Analysis Of Disclaim Resources In The Counterterrorism Discourses From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Language and society are closely related.Language is a reflection of social changes and society influences the development of language.Language is presented in various types of social-related discourses such as counterterrorism discourses,whichare embodied in the political speeches and media reports with counterterrorism as the theme.Counterterrorism has been attached worldwide importancesince 9/11 attacks in 2001.In general,there is a small amount of formal and authoritative counterterrorism discourses published by the official organizations.As the direct victim of 9/11 attacks,the United Stateshas been playing an important role in counteringterrorism and established the Bureau of Counterterrorism to coordinate all efforts to improve counterterrorism cooperation.Thecounterterrorism discourses published by the U.S.Bureau of Counterterrorism are of typicality for the study of the counterterrorism discourses.In recent years,thecounterterrorism discourses have attracted increasingly international attention.The previousresearch on the counterterrorism discourseshas been mainly conducted from the political and cultural perspectives.There is still lack of research on thecounterterrorism discourses from a linguistic perspective.The counterterrorism discourses are abundant with disclaim resources to reflect the dialogism between the language users in the discourse.However,there is no systematic classification for the exploration of disclaim resources yet.Based on the corpus tools UAM Corpus Tool 3 and AntConc 3.4.1,this study makes an analysis of disclaim resources inthecounterterrorism discoursesreleased by the U.S.Bureau of Counterterrorismin light of Appraisal Theory.15 counterterrorism discourses are collected with the standard of content and length.The research questions are:(1)What types of disclaim resources do the counterterrorism discourses contain?(2)What features of disclaim resources dothe counterterrorism discourses reflect?(3)What are the functions of disclaim resources in the counterterrorism discourses?During the process of study,the author firstly used UAM Corpus Tool 3 to annotate the features of disclaim resources and then employed AntConc 3.4.1 to search the key words of disclaim resourcesin the counterterrorism discourses.Later,the author analyzed the statistics according to the results of the corpus tools.The findings are as follows:(1)There are two types of disclaim resources in the counterterrorism discourses,namely,Deny and Counter.Disclaim resources are mainly realized by lexical devices.The employment of Deny is more used than that of Counter.In terms of meaning,Deny can be grouped by words with the meaning of “terror” and “fight”.In terms of form,Deny can be divided by lexical words with comparative and negative forms.Counter can be categorized into direct Counter and indirect Counter according to the ways of expression.(2)There are two types of featuresin the counterterrorism discourses,namely,explicit/implicit features and strong/weak features.The frequency of disclaim resources with explicit and strong features is lower than that with implicit and weak features.Implicit deny with negative or comparative meanings is most frequently employed in the counterterrorism discourses.In specific,Deny can be divided into four sub-features: explicit strong feature,explicit weak feature,implicit strong feature,and implicit weak feature.Counter can be grouped by two sub-features: explicit strong feature and implicit weak feature.(3)By employing the disclaim resources with different types and features,the speakers contract the dialogic space and exclude other opinions and stances in the counterterrorism discourses.In this way,they establish an alignment with the audience on counterterrorism.The employment of disclaim resources is conductive to helping the speakers develop a positive image of the United States,convince the rationality of counterterrorism activities and promote the international counterterrorism cooperation.This study is helpful to enrich the framework of Engagement and brings up a new classification of disclaim resources in a more systematicway.The findings of the study are beneficial to enlarge the understanding of disclaim resources,especially the disclaim wordswith information function.In the meantime,this study canhelp people obtain a better understandingof the counterterrorism discourses andhas implications on the research of relevant linguistic fields such as political discourses as well.