Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On Sino-U.S. Trade Frictions From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

China and the United States are two great economic powers in the world.The trade pattern featuring complementarily and mutual benefit not only concerns the development of the two countries,but also guarantees the stable development of the world economy.However,Sino-U.S.trade relations have been developing amid frictions and twists since the establishment of trade relations between the two countries.Trade frictions between China and the United States have further escalated in 2018.Critical discourse analysis(CDA)has made great achievements in the interdisciplinary fields of social sciences and humanities in recent decades,and opened up language studies at different levels and in various fields.However,at present,CDA has not put forward mature theories,methods and analytical tools in the psychological and cognitive interpretation of the social mechanism and process of discourse generation and understanding.The integration of critical discourse analysis and proximization theory,the latest cognition-oriented theory of cognitive pragmatics will make up for the deficiency of traditional critical discourse analysis theories and methods.Based on Piotr Cap's proximization theory and STA analysis model,20 pieces of news reports about Sino-U.S.trade frictions in the Washington post in 2018 were selected as the research corpus and their proximization language strategies in three dimensions of spatial,temporal,and axiological axis were critically analyzed by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods.The research results show that:In order to prove the legitimacy of the United States' trade policies and behaviors toward China,these 20 pieces of news reports respectively use the following language proximization strategies:1.Spatial proximization strategies were used to construal the threat through ODC characterization,impact speed and impact consequences to enhance the legitimacy of the United States' behaviors;2.real time(RT)and construal marker(CT)temporal proximization strategies were used to conjecture China's past dangerous behaviors and unwarranted speculation on China's future policies and behaviors;3.Axiological proximization with high and explicit impact probability and axiological proximization with low(er)and implicit impact probability were used to build a positive image of the United States and a negative image of China.The fusion of proximization theory and CDA provides a new perspective for the study of CD A,widens the research methods of CDA,and enriches the application fields of proximization theory research.In addition,in today's increasingly frequent international communication,we also need to understand the language strategies of western countries,reveal how discourse achieves the effect of manipulation and persuasion,so that the public can know the discourse causes of "facts" in western news reports,and strive for more discourse power for China in international communication.