A Study Of Chinese Diplomatic Discourse On The South China Sea Issue From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

China, as a great power in the world, has a more and more important position in international affairs. Its national policy and attitudes towards some crucial issues have attracted great attention from home and abroad. Therefore, Chinese diplomatic discourse has always been a great concern in academia. Previous studies on Chinese diplomatic discourse are mainly general study of features and techniques of diplomatic language from the perspective of pragmatics in the guidance of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Presupposition and so on, and they do not dig deep to the wording features of Chinese diplomatic discourse from the level of word and phrases. The Appraisal Theory is a new frame of lexical grammar in systemic-functional linguistics developed from the researches about interpersonal meaning, which can help to analyze the Chinese diplomatic discourse from the lexical level. In this thesis, the author analyzed Chinese foreign press conferences on South China Sea issues from the perspective of engagement system under the Appraisal Theory.Engagement system deals with the linguistic resources via which the authorial voice engages itself with the alternative voices in the dialogical context. The author selected 30 pieces of Chinese foreign press conferences mainly on the South China Sea Arbitration as the research data and made a detailed analysis of the engagement resources in the collected data.The author found that the Chinese spokespersons tend to employ more'heteroglossic' resources than 'monoglossic' resources. While in 'heteroglossic' resources,the spokespersons employ more 'contract' resources than 'expand' resources so as to clearly state the standpoints of Chinese government they represent, to establish their authority and to fend off the challenges or even traps from the journalists. Within the'contract' resources,'disclaim' resources far outweigh 'proclaim' resources,which just goes against the findings by previous scholars. It is due to that Chinese government never withdraws on the key issues such as territorial problems and China has renewed its image as a great power which is never afraid of challenge in recent years. Within the 'expand,resources, 'attribute' resources far outweigh 'entertain' resources, which is also against the findings in previous study. It may be because when facing with the thorny problems in diplomacy like the Arbitration, the Chinese' spokesperson needs to cite various references to make the journalists clear about the facts behind the issue and the supporting voices from the international community to Chinese standpoints.As to the wording features of the Chinese diplomatic discourses, the author found that first, Chinese spokesperson seldom employs modal conjuncts,like perhaps (??),probably (??) for they give a sense of weakness and hesitation in Chinese; second,Chinese spokesperson tends to quote a large amount of reported speeches to show the relative facts and situations on the concerning issue, that is to say, Chinese spokesperson tends to state the facts and situations in an indirect way; third, when Chinese spokesperson employs 'distance' resources, there is a sense of disagreement with the cited proposition he or she just presents, and Chinese spokesperson has a preference for???(so-called) when he or she intends to disassociate from the current proposition;four, when facing with questions on key issues, such as territorial problems, Chinese spokesperson tends to directly deny the challenging voices so as to show China's determination to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity and China's confidence to face with any challenge; five, sometimes Chinese spokesperson cites some famous sayings from ancient Chinese classics to support his or her standpoints, without mentioning the citing sources, and this is a tradition or settled habit of Chinese people in their expression or argument, which is appreciated by Chinese people and can easily arouse echoes in Chinese people's mind, but sometimes adds the difficulties for foreign journalists to understand; six, Chinese spokesperson employs 'pronounce' resources initiated by ??(regardless) and ??(no matter whatever or whoever) to emphasize the warrantability of the propositions in the main clauses; last but not least, Chinese spokesperson tends to employ 'presumption' resources realized by ? so as to construe the proposition as some 'given' fact.The thesis promotes the application of Appraisal Theory in dealing with Chinese materials and helps people from home and abroad to have a better understanding of Chinese diplomatic discourse, especially the language in Chinese foreign press conference.