A Pragma-Dialectical Study on Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Remarks on Japan's New Defense White Paper

Abstract—In Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's Remarks, the spokesperson always justifies standpoints or refutes the claims. From this perspective, the spokesperson’s remark is a kind of argumentative discourse. Therefore, this paper studies Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Remarks on Japan's New Defense White Paper from the perspective of Pragma-dialectics and hopes to be helpful for researches on political texts. In strategic maneuvering, for potential topic, the spokesperson Geng Shuang chooses legality and peace as the topics that are commonly accepted and so is helpful for three argumentations, which indicates choosing the topics which accord with most people’s values can be useful in argumentation. For audience demand, the argumentation made by the spokesperson meets the demands of three groups of audience, which indicates the arguer should meet the demands of different groups of audience. And for presentation device, the spokesperson uses contrast to make his argumentation more convincing. In the analysis of Ten Commandments, the selected Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks obey three commandments which are Relevance rule, Argument scheme rule and Validity rule.

Index Terms—Foreign ministry spokesperson's remark, pragma-dialectics, political texts.

The authors are with the Northwestern Polytechnical University, China (e-mail: 13201761015@163.com).

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Cite: Zhang Tong, Tian Jianguo, and Wang Fangyuan, "A Pragma-Dialectical Study on Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Remarks on Japan's New Defense White Paper," International Journal of Culture and History vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 64-70, 2018.