A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis On Sino-us’ Official Discourse About Covid-19

Covid-19 broke out unexpectedly in late 2019 and swept the world,and this pandemic was originally an international health security issue,but it was coloured politically later.Under such a circumstance,this thesis adopts the method of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to make a comparative analysis of Chinese and American official discourse on Covid-19,trying to study their discourse characteristics at the description level,the interpretation level,and the explanation level.The purpose of this dissertation is to provide research ideas for understanding the construction of national identities in official discourse both in China and the United States in response to public health emergencies afterward.This study’s theoretical framework is Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,and discourse is selected from the website of the U.S.Department of State and the White House,and the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China.Then two corpora are built,combining corpus-based quantitative with a qualitative method,and official discourse will be analyzed critically from three dimensions,namely,description,interpretation,and explanation.This thesis’ s major findings are as follows:From the description level,text analysis mainly concentrates on the identical high-frequency content words,keyword lists,and modal verbs.At first,from the result of the same high-frequency content words,it reveals that since this outbreak,the American side has discursively constructed Chinese national identities as the opposite of what the Chinese discourse has constructed.With regard to the collocations of the keyword list’s result,it shows that American discourse poses strongly political meaning,trying to politicize this issue.While the Chinese side attempts to maximize the depoliticization of the Covid-19 and to reduce it as a global public health event.As for the modal verbs,it discloses that though both America and China use an amount of median value modal verbs,their stands are totally different in the specific contexts.Moreover,from the interpretation level,from the perspective of discourse resource,what has been summarized is that the American discourse resource is single,while the Chinese discourse resource is rich.And the majority of Chinese and American reported discourse applies Specific Source,and from it,the resource from officials takes the largest proportion;nevertheless,on the Chinese side,the resource from professional organizations & experts almost takes the same percentage as officials.In terms of discourse mode,Besides,both China and America adopt direct discourse and indirect discourse largely,but the American side incorporates its subjective opinions into reported discourse and tends to construct negative identities of China.However,the Chinese side maximizes the presentation of objective discourse and avoids integrating subjective views into discourse.Lastly,from the explanation level,the results from the first two stages will be discussed further in politics,economy,and culture.It can be concluded that factors in social practice,such as political system and order,economical conditions,and cultural patterns can largely influence how Chinese and American official discourse replied to Covid-19 and what kinds of Chinese national identities are constructed discursively.