Study of Public Communication in the International Sphere: A Comparative Research on the Diplomatic Discourse of China and Spain

Abstract

In this thesis, diplomatic speeches from Spain and China in the event interval 2019-2022 are collected and selected as an analytical corpus for this study, and the corpus is annotated and coded using a relevant theoretical framework. In the third part, 14 speeches are selected as a dedicated analytical corpus and divided into seven groups according to the themes and scenarios of the speeches. The priorities of the Spanish and Chinese governments on different issues are analysed at the lexical level to construct a discursive lexical resource of national identities as well as positions; at the syntactic level, the Mode and Modality theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics is used as an analytical tool to explore the discourses made in different discourses, exploring the discursive functions and effects of the utterances made in different syntactic forms; at the textual level, it includes the genre structure, the metaphors that construct the discourse and the cooperation and crisis constructed in the discursive space. It analyses the constitutive patterns and the logic of message progression in Spanish and Chinese diplomatic discourses, which serve as metaphors for the construction of meaning in the chapters, as well as for the segmentation of the discursive space. In the fourth section, we select the themes, question patterns and strategies of evasion, vagueness, euphemism, and legitimisation used by the Chinese and Spanish diplomatic leaders in their question-and-answer sessions with journalists.