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.
Index Terms—Diplomatic commitment, diplomatic discourse,
press conference, speech act.
Hua Yin and Yang Chen are with the College of Humanities and Social
Sciences in Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China (e-mail:
19S059006@stu.hit.edu.cn, drchenyang@hit.edu.cn).
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Cite:Hua Yin and Yang Chen, "Speech Act in Diplomacy: How China Makes Commitments in Diplomatic Press Conference," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 170-176, 2020.