A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump and Biden Administrations’China Policies

The theory of proximization is an effective discourse strategy to study the speaker’s ability to achieve his own legitimacy or reinforce the other’s illegitimacy,and its superiority can be maximized by means of quantitative and comparative analysis.In this study,we collected reports on Trump’s and Biden’s policies on China to build two small corpora,with a total of 11,030 words in the Trump corpus and 17,566 words in the Biden corpus.The critical discourse analysis is combined with proximization theory.With the help of BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2,Antconc 3.5.7,and Log-Likelihood and Chi-Square Calculator 1.0,a critical cognitive score of the relevant discourse was conducted from the perspective of proximization theory.It has been found that:(1)Both Trump and Biden administrations resort to a large number of spatial proximization strategies to build ODCs converging to IDCs with China as the ODC,posing a threat to internal physical IDCs;(2)in the use of temporal proximization strategy,both administrations use primarily modal verbs and various entities to construct ODCs that extend indefinitely into the present and future,emphasizing the urgency and the threat of the effect and reinforcing the legitimacy of their actions;(3)in terms of axiological proximization strategy,the two administrations differ greatly from each other,indicating that there are still discursive biases.