A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Construction Of President Xi Jinping's International Political Speeches

As public discourse,political speech performs various functions of expressing stance,expounding views,and communicating ideas concerning national and foreign affairs of a state,and one's power,ideology,values as well.As the largest developing country,China attracts increasing attention from the whole world.In recent years,President Xi Jinping has delivered many important speeches which play an extremely significant role in international affairs.All the speeches are delivered to establish an international community of peace,development,cooperation,and mutual profit.Researches at home and abroad have been done on political speeches from various perspectives,such as Li Xia's study(2007)of Bush's speech within Critical Discourse Analysis,Jiang Xue & Liu Wei's analysis(2008)of Obama's presidential inaugural addresses from the perspective of meta-functions,and Beard's work(2000)The Language of Politics,illustrating some typical features of political speech from the perspective of discourse analysis and so on.Researchers at home have studied President Xi's political speeches from various perspectives,such as theoretical thinking,value orientation,Chinese dream,and diplomatic policy,etc.However,Xi's political speeches have seldom been studied from linguistic perspectives.This research conducts an analysis of President Xi's political speeches in international occasions,adopting Modality System by Halliday(1994)and Attitude system within appraisal theory by Martin and White(2008)as the theoretical framework.As an extension of Halliday's interpersonal meaning in Systemic-Functional Linguistics,Appraisal theory evaluates language user's opinion,stance and attitude towards happenings through analysis of the lexical resources in discourse.The Appraisal theory contains three systems,including Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.This research mainly makes an analysis of interpersonal meaning construction from the perspective of modality system and attitude system with its subsystems of affect,judgment and appreciation.President Xi's political speeches are downloaded from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn and http://www.china.org.cn.Diplomatic relationships,climate change,nuclear security,civilizations and economy are topics discussed by President Xi in his speeches.Statisticsoftware Antconc3.4.3 is used together with manual mark to show the distributions of modal expressions and attitudinal resources in the data.Microsoft Office Word 2007 is also used to assist the annotation of the corpus.It aims to answer the following three questions through the analysis: First,what topics are presented in President Xi's speeches? Second,what are the distributions of modal expressions and attitudinal resources in President Xi's speech? Third,what interpersonal meaning is realized through such distributions?Data analysis indicates the following findings: first,President Xi discussed the following topics in his speeches: development,cooperation,peace,economy,reform and opening-up,civilization,climate change,and nuclear issues.Second,among modal expressions,probability and obligation expressions are used most.Faced with various problems,challenges,or opportunities in international occasions,President Xi expresses China's responsibility,willingness,determination to tackle problems,develop and cooperate with other countries.Among attitudinal resources,appreciation resources and affect resources are used most.President Xi indicates people's hatred of war,aggression,conflict,and violence etc.and hopes to construct a peaceful,harmonious,and developmental world.Last,President Xi mainly uses modal expressions and attitudinal resources to show Chinese views and consideration concerning topics under discussion,and their distribution conveys China's friendly diplomatic policy and sincere hopes to uphold peace,harmony,equality,and freedom of the world together with other countries.Among President Xi's important speeches,the interpersonal meaning construction is mainly reflected from his attitudes toward international and domestic affairs.The present research is of great significance to understand the characteristics of President Xi's political speeches.Meanwhile,it provides a certain reference and enlightenment for the future studies of political speeches.