抗疫演讲语篇中的顺应、同化与合作：语篇语义视角

公共演讲中的人际意义对维系社会秩序具有重要作用。个体化是研究人际意义的语言学手段之一，它从语言使用者、社会文化资源分配与亲和关系出发，将语篇看作语篇生产者主动协调社会关系的过程。外国政府官员通过抗疫演讲动员民众抗疫，是个体协调社会关系的典型范例。对演讲语篇关键词和索引行的语篇语义分析发现：（1）抗疫演讲语篇呈现“发生—应对”的逻辑序列；（2）概念意义在被注入人际意义后建立了个体间的情感纽带；（3）主流文化身份、国家人物和事件这些绑定符号推动了群体联合；（4）在个体—群体连续统上，从个体到群体的价值和身份协商建构了顺应、同化和合作的社会过程。

Adaptation,Assimilation and Cooperation in Addresses on Covid-19: A Perspective of Discourse Semantics

Public speaking intends to be appealing to listeners and is abundant in interpersonal resources. Interpersonal construction in public speaking has implications for the social integration. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, public speaking is a staged and goal-oriented social process. Individuation, a framework developed by James Martin, focuses on the language users, the meaning resources of culture and affiliation. From the Individuation perspective, discourse is viewed as a process in which discourse producers actively coordinate social relations. Overseas government officials align citizens by delivering speeches on Covid-19, which is an illustrative example to show how individuals coordinate social relations. This study broadens what the Individuation theory used to cover in terms of the characteristics of identity and context. To be more specific, in the addresses on Covid-19, speakers’ identities are special and powerful, and speakers from different countries and parties or even the same country show varied individual preferences, all of which contribute to the understanding of the relations among language use, identity and context. This paper builds a small corpus of addresses in English on Covid-19, and explores how government officials build alignment between individual and community within the framework of Individuation.The paper first extracts keywords of speeches by means of the corpus tool WordSmith, and then the Ideation System and the Appraisal System from Discourse Semantics are employed to analyze the ideational and interpersonal meaning of the keywords. The findings show that the taxonomic relations among keywords highlight two pivotal clues, i. e., the pandemic and human beings; meanwhile, the nuclear relations among concordance lines reveal the logical relations between participants and processes, thus to figure out the emergence-confrontation sequence. This sequence can be divided into four phases, namely the nature of coronavirus, the current pandemic situation, government policies and citizens’ actions. It suggests that speakers infuse values in the experiential meaning within each phase, and the coupling of ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning generates individual bonds, mainly including the shared negative emotional experiences and the consensus about combating the Covid-19. Besides, the emphasis on master cultural identity as well as bonding icons represented by the national leading figures and events achieves a higher-level community affiliation. However, addresses vary from speaker to speaker, which reflects distinctions in meaning resources of the culture and individual initiative.To conclude, speakers’ negotiation of value and identity from individual to community promote the realization of social processes as adaptation, assimilation and cooperation, which paves the way to fight jointly against Covid-19. In the pandemic context, the authoritative discourse presents plural social forms and expressive functions, and establishes officials’ multi-dimensional institutional and individual identities. The bonding and aligning process offers insight into reasonable uses of social semiotic resources and ways to promote positive and efficient communications.