Speech Act in Diplomacy: How China Makes Commitments in Diplomatic Press Conference

Abstract

Diplomatic commitments are often made in diplomatic settings to demonstrate a country's future actions. Based on the speech act theory, this study explores how Chinese foreign ministry spokespersons make diplomatic commitments in Chinese ministry of foreign affairs regular press conferences. This study adopted a corpus pragmatic approach and examined commissive speech acts in a self-established corpus consisting transcribed dialogs of 112 press conferences. The findings of this study include: 1) 98.64% of identified commissive speech acts were implicit performatives, among which future tense (59.45%) and modals (32.36%) were two most frequently used approaches to perform commissives; 2) Chinese spokespersons adjusted the use of commissive words in their speech acts for different diplomatic topics; 3) high-frequency words in commissive sentences revealed China's diplomatic ideologies of togetherness and continuity. The findings of this study present noticeable features of commissives performed by Chinese foreign ministry spokespersons and provide an innovative perspective to understand Chinese diplomatic discourse.