Use of attitudinal and engagement appraisal resources for legitimizing discourse : an analysis of the opening remark of the US-China diplomatic talks in Alaska

Abstract

In recent years, the United States and China have engaged in a prolonged standoff due to trade wars and competition in political and military aspects. Upon Biden’s administration, the first US-China diplomatic press conference was taken place in Anchorage, Alaska, on the 18th and 19th of March 2021. This press conference is also known as the Alaska talks and has attracted lots of media attention. The talk was considered “heated” (Tan, 2021) and “tense” (Jakes & Myers, 2021), with both China and the US “rebuke” when discussing controversial political issues (McCurry, 2021). As Schaffner (1996) points out, “any political action is prepared, accompanied, controlled and influenced by language” (p.201). Adhering to this notion, the present study intends to explore the linguistic resources used by the representatives from the US and China to express their political ideologies and stances, as well as the ways they legitimize their claims. Hence, this study drew on the evaluative resources from the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) to examine the strategies of legitimization (Reyes, 2011) used by the two countries in the press conference. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that both China and the US adopted judgement resources dominantly to legitimize their arguments and delegitimize the arguments of each other. Interestingly, it is discovered that altruism – one of the five strategies of legitimization proposed by Reyes (2011) was utilized frequently in their speeches to accentuate their accomplishments and contribution to their people and the world. Additionally, findings also reveal that China tended to express its attitude more implicitly while the US tended to be more explicit, which could be ascribed to the influence of cross-cultural pragmatics.