A Study of Xi Jinping’s Speech Discourse in the Context of Metadiscourse

Abstract

Metadiscourse is an important concept in the field of discourse analysis, but related studies have been confined to various genres of written discourse. There is little research on the persuasive function of metadiscourse in speech. This paper adopts a data analysis method to collect keynote speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremonies of the 1th to 4th China International Import Expo and Xi Jinping’s New Year message from 2014 to 2022, with a total of 13 speeches as the corpus of this research. Based on the literature research method, directives, self-mentions, and attitude markers of Hyland’s Model of Metadiscourse are combined with the affective appeals of Aristotle’s rhetorical persuasion theory as an analytical framework to analyze the corpus. And the purpose of this paper is to discuss how these three types of metadiscourse achieve affective appeals in Xi Jinping’s speeches. The study finds that these three types of metadiscourse are frequently used in Xi Jinping’s speeches and have realized an important affective appeal function as well as enhanced the persuasion effect of the speech. Directives, self-mentions, and attitude markers are conducive to affective appeal, resonating with the audience, and achieving the purpose of persuasion in the speech. This paper finds ways to promote the audience’s understanding of speech from the perspective of metadiscourse rhetorical persuasion by studying the affective appeal function of metadiscourse in Xi Jinping’s speeches.