ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of instances of attempted delegitimisations of an opponent in a set of corpora of interactive spoken discourse, namely, recent Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry press briefings, in which a professional spokesperson responds to questions from journalists relating to foreign policy. Delegitimisation can be seen as both an aggressive and a defensive technique for dealing with undesirable information in political discourse. In the corpus-assisted research on Chinese Ministry for Foreign Affairs (CMFA) briefings, M. Marakhovskaiia and A. Partington looked at ways in which the spokespersons of the CMFA treated the ethos or face of other national actors or organisations over the course of 2016, using the English language transcripts on CMFA website. The regularities are identified by comparison and the pinpointing of salience through keyness analysis, which can reveal salient speech acts such as criticism or praise.
