Legitimization In American Diplomatic Discourse From A Cognitive-Functional Perspective

Legitimization of diplomatic discourse has received increasing attention in the field of discourse study in recent years.Various scholars have approached this phenomenon from different perspectives,such as pragmatics,Systemic Functional Linguistics,critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.As the latest analytic framework for legitimization,the Spatial-Temporal-Axiological model proposed by Cap’s Proximization Theory has been widely heeded in this field.However,the majority of the previous studies lacked multiple perspectives and due attention to the deficiencies of Proximization Theory.And although the data of previous researches always involved the major diplomatic strategies of the United States,the related study on Iran nuclear discourse has hardly been touched.Therefore,the thesis sets out to bridge these gaps by incorporating the Attitude system of Appraisal Theory into Proximization Theory and investigating the legitimization pattern of Trump Administration’s Iran nuclear discourse from a cognitive-functional perspective.The data of the study involves a self-compiled corpus of 21 texts(26335 words in total),which has been collected from the official website of the White House regarding Trump Administration’s Iran nuclear discourse spanning the years of 2017 to 2019.The thesis first annotated the data and calculated the statistics of the related lexico-grammatical resources,and then conducted a qualitative analysis based on the revised legitimization model proposed in this thesis.After the quantitative-qualitative analysis,the thesis provided answers to the three research questions: In Trump Administration’s Iran nuclear discourse,1)how are the attitudinal resources strategically utilized to achieve the dichotomy of two opposing groups? 2)how are the proximization strategies used to construct imminent threats? 3)how do the attitudinal and proximization resources collectively contribute to an overall legitimization pattern?The thesis has reaped the following findings:Firstly,Trump Administration strategically used the three attitudinal resources—affect,judgement and appreciation,to re-construct threat of Iran,magnify the flaws of Iran nuclear deal,praise their own Iran policies and align themselves with Iranian democratic fighters and common people,which work in a joint effort to result in the formation of two opposing groups in the Discourse Space(DS):the “good” insidedeictic-center entities(IDCs)led by “Trump” and the “evil” outside-deictic-center entities(ODCs)led by “Iran”.Secondly,Trump Administration utilized proximization strategies to construe imminent ODC threats encroaching spatially,temporally and axiologically upon the IDCs.To be more specific,spatial proximization construe a physically invasive threat of Iran through negative characterization,fastness and disastrous consequences of ODC(Iran’s camp)impact.Besides,modal auxiliary verbs “will/would”,“can/could”,nominalization “threat”,“aggression”,the combination of simple past tense and present perfect aspect,and parallel contrastive discourse forms in temporal proximization centralize “now” as the exactly right time to take preventive measures.Axiological proximization construes an ideological conflict between the U.S.and Iran.Values such as “security”,“freedom”,“peace” are used to describe IDC camp while negative values such as “violence”,“terrorism”,“human right abuse” are designated to Iran’s ODC camp.Thirdly,incorporating the Attitude system of Appraisal Theory into Proximization Theory helps overcome the shortcomings of the latter and contribute to a better understanding of the formation of two opposing groups,IDCs and ODCs,in the DS,which is not only the premises of the further ODC-IDC Proximization but also an indispensable part of the overall legitimization pattern in discourse.Fourthly,the legitimization pattern of American diplomatic discourse generally consists of two parts: manufacturing confrontations and manipulating emotions.The former means that American government strategically uses attitudinal resources to justify their actions by grouping America into the “good” IDC camp.The latter means that American government employs proximization strategies to construe the imminent external threat and raise the public’s fear and anxiety to legitimate their policy as necessary preventive actions.This thesis,on the one hand,has made theoretical contribution by pointing out and making up for the deficiency of Proximization Theory and testifying the feasibility of the proposed model in a case study of the legitimization pattern of Trump Administration’s Iran nuclear discourse.Practically,on the other hand,the thesis has interpreted the Trump Administration’s Iran nuclear discourse from a linguistic perspective,which not only helps to grasp the current situation of Iran nuclear deal but also sheds light on the general legitimization pattern of American diplomatic discourse.