A Contrastive Study Of The Appraisal Resources In Chinese And American Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Discourses Regarding The Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Appraisal theory,which is extended from Systematic Functional Linguistics(SFL),intends to study the interpersonal meaning of discourse through lexical realizations.In recent years,appraisal theory has boomed both at home and abroad,but there are few relevant studies on the diplomatic spokesperson’s discourse,especially the contrastive studies.This study,under the theoretical framework of appraisal theory,has selected the topic of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the discourses of American Foreign Ministry(AFM)and Chinese Foreign Ministry(CFM)spokespersons from March to September 2022 as the first-hand data to build two small corpora for comparison,aiming to discuss the similarities and differences of the distribution,employment and lexical realizations of the appraisal resources under the three systems of attitude,engagement and graduation and answer the following questions:1.How are appraisal resources distributed and employed in the discourses of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokespersons under the three appraisal systems of attitude,engagement and graduation?2.How are appraisal resources realized lexically in the discourses of Chinese and American Foreign Ministry spokespersons under the three appraisal systems of attitude,engagement and graduation?In terms of the attitude resources,there is a different tendency distributed between American corpus and Chinese corpus.In the Chinese corpus,appreciation resources occupy the largest proportion,second by judgement resources,and affect resources come last.While in the American corpus,judgement resources occupy the largest proportion,second by appreciation resources,and affect resources come last.In terms of the employment,CFM spokespersons tend to apply high-frequency positive inclination resources of affect to advocate a peaceful settlement of the Russia-Ukraine conflict through negotiation,which indirectly reflects China’s neutral and objective diplomatic position on this conflict,and employ negative propriety resources of judgement with high frequency to evaluate the US involved in this conflict,judging whether the US behaviors in this conflict are in accordance with morality and international principles.Furthermore,they incline to apply high-frequency positive valuation resources of appreciation to emphasize the importance of mitigation strategies,which indicates that China performs an active role of responsible power.On the other hand,AFM spokespersons tend to apply most frequent positive inclination resources of affect to demonstrate American diplomatic position on this conflict as the US sides with Ukraine and declares against Russia and employ high-frequency negative propriety resources of judgement to evaluate Russia--the major party of this conflict--by spreading negative ideologies of Russia to seek the public recognition of the diplomatic position.Similar to CFM speakers,AFM spokespersons employ high-frequency positive valuation resources of appreciation to emphasize the importance of mitigation strategies the US advocates.With regard to the engagement resources,the research mainly focuses on heterogloss resources.In the Chinese corpus,dialogic expansion resources appear more times than dialogic contraction while in the American corpus,there are more occurrences of dialogic contraction than dialogic expansion.Such distribution indicates that CFM speakers incline to widen more dialogic space,making their diplomatic discourses more convincing and objective,while AFM speakers tend to narrow the dialogic space,claiming the authority over the diplomatic discourse and firm confrontation with Russia.As for the graduation resources,both CFM and AFM speakers tend to apply more force resources than focus resources.Besides,both sides employ high-frequency intensification resources to describe the nature of this conflict and sharpen resources to emphasize the importance of mitigation strategies that each side advocates respectively.Regarding the lexical realizations of the appraisal resources,the researcher found out some features distributed in both corpora.In the attitude system,the proportion of verbs applied by CFM speakers is higher than AFM speakers while the frequency of adjectives,adverbs and nouns is quite the opposite.While in the engagement and graduation system,both spokespersons of CFM and AFM tend to apply some regular and specific expressions with high frequency which are semantically similar.This study combines appraisal theory with Chinese and American diplomatic discourses for cross-linguistic contrastive analysis,which has enriched the studies on diplomatic discourse in the field of appraisal theory.In addition,the research also contributes to better handling the Sino-US relations,further improving the international influence of Chinese discourse and promoting the construction of foreign discourse system with Chinese characteristics.