A corpus-based analysis of the stylistic features of Chinese and American diplomatic discourse

Chenxia Zhang; Muhammad Afzaal; Abdulfattah Omar; Waheed M A Altohami

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1122675

A corpus-based analysis of the stylistic features of Chinese and American diplomatic discourse

Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 14:14:1122675. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1122675. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Chenxia Zhang¹, Muhammad Afzaal², Abdulfattah Omar^{3

4}, Waheed M A Altohami^{3

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Languages, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, China.
² Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China.
³ Department of English, College of Science & Humanities, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Faculty of Arts, Port Said University, Port Said, Egypt.
⁵ Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Education, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt.

Abstract

The study investigates the linguistic aspects of Chinese and American diplomatic discourse using Biber's theoretical underpinnings of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis. The corpus of the study comprises texts taken from the official websites of the Chinese and US governments from 2011 to 2020. The study results show that China's diplomatic discourse falls into the text type of learned exposition which includes informational expositions focused on conveying information. In contrast, the United States diplomatic discourse falls into the text type of "involved persuasion," which is persuasive and argumentative. Furthermore, the two-way ANOVA test reveals few distinctions between spoken and written diplomatic discourse from the same country. Furthermore, T-tests demonstrate that the diplomatic discourse of the two countries differs significantly in three dimensions. In addition, the study highlights that China's diplomatic discourse is informationally dense and context independent. In contrast, the United States diplomatic discourse is emotive and interactional, strongly dependent on context, and created within time restrictions. Finally, the study's findings contribute to a systematic knowledge of the genre aspects of diplomatic discourse and are helpful for more effective diplomatic discourse system creation.

Keywords: China and the United States; corpus studies; diplomatic discourse; multi-dimensional analysis; stylistic features.