A Comparative Study Of Attitude Markers In Chinese And American Diplomatic Discourse From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Attitude marker,widely used in human language,is an important way to express personal emotion and judgement.The ministers or secretaries of countries convey the political position of the state and the attitude towards some international events in their speeches at the press conference and other occasions.Their speech discourses are of great value.It will be a meaningful attempt to study the oral discourses of Chinese and American spokespersons.So far,the research on attitude markers is conducted mainly from the perspective of metadiscourse and stance markers,and there is a lack of in-depth study on attitude markers.From the perspective of Appraisal Theory,most of the studies on diplomatic discourse have turned to Positive Discourse Analysis or Critical Discourse Analysis,while there are few comparative studies on attitude markers in Chinese and American diplomatic discourses.Therefore,this thesis aims to use the Appraisal Theory as the theoretical framework to make a comparative study of the attitude markers in the diplomatic discourses of Chinese Foreign Minister and the United States Secretaries of State from two dimensions:quantitative and qualitative.Through the analysis of the two corpora,these can be found form the current study:generally speaking,the number of attitude markers used in Chinese and American diplomatic discourses about the United Nations is relatively small;there are more attitude markers in American diplomatic discourse than in Chinese,while there is no significant difference in quantity.This shows that China and the United States are still more cautious in expressing their positions on the United Nations and its related work in public to avoid attracting criticism.In terms of attitude polarity,the number of positive attitude markers is significantly larger than that of negative ones.It shows that China and the United States have a relatively positive attitude towards the United Nations and its related work,that is,on the whole,they agree with the importance and necessity of the existence of the United Nations as the largest international organization in the world today.With regard to attitude realization,there are significantly more inscribed attitude markers than invoked ones.This indicates that in the diplomatic arena,countries try their best to use semantically unambiguous words to clearly express their positions and attitudes,so as to avoid semantic distortion due to different positions.In a word,the research on the use of attitude markers in Chinese and American diplomatic discourses is not only an extension of the study of metadiscourse and stance markers,but also enriches the application of Appraisal Theory.In addition,this will also help readers or audience to further understand the attitudinal expression in Chinese and American diplomatic discourse.In this way,this study can not only to some degree deepen the understanding of the true connotations of the speakers and the cultural differences between China and the West,but also be of some help to better convey the China’s voice on the international stage and enhance China’s international discourse power.