A Critical Discourse Analysis of the US and China Political Speeches—Based on the Two Speeches Respectively by Trump and Wang Yi in the General Debate of the 72nd Session of UN Assembly

Abstract

The research attempts to analyze two political discourses delivered respectively by American president Donald Trump and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in the 72nd session of UN assembly. With Fairclough’s 3-Dimensional Discourse Model as the analytical framework, we make an investigation into the two political discourses so as to gain insights into the interplay of discourse, ideology and society, by examining linguistic characteristics of text, discursive and social practice dimensions. On the first dimension of text, we find that both leaders prefer Judgment resources to the other two resources within the Affect System in their remarks, by resorting to the new advancement in Systemic Functional Grammar—Martin’s Attitude subsystem under his Appraisal framework, and closely examining the interpersonal metafunctions, coupled with statistical measures. Within the Judgment subsystem, there exist significant differences between the two speeches in terms of Tenacity+ resources. On the dimension of discursive practice, our research reveals that both leaders use a great number of intertextuality resources in the remarks. Besides, both leaders have a preference to the sub-category of “The Original Producer of Discourse being the Speaker’s Compatriots” under the category of “Intertextuality”. That is, Wang Yi has a preference for the lines of Chinese sages in the Antiquity, whereas Trump is fond of using intertextuality resources from a diversity of domains, such as laws and statues, legal texts and documents of governments. Lastly, we develop an understanding of roles played by “American First” ideology and Chinese government’s national interest in today’s political arena through analyzing technologizing means of discourses.