Hangzhou Municipal Government’s Diplomatic Image in English Work Reports: A Diachronic Corpus Approach

Abstract

This article selects the city of Hangzhou as a sample to explore how the China’s municipal government established its diplomatic image through discourse features in government English work reports. The research extracts the six years’ government’s English work reports from Hangzhou government official website to establish the corpus and employs the corpus tool of Antconc to retrieve and collect the data of different word classes. Through comparing and summarizing their changing curves, the discourse features with mostly marked changing characteristics are selected for analysis. Thus, the governance features and the government image established in the discourses are explored. Meanwhile in order to further analyze the governance situation and development in the international environment, Mayor’s State of the City Reports of City of Reading, Pennsylvania are selected to establish a parallel corpora for comparing the linguistic features of the government reports in China and in US.