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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
LIU Congling, YANG Xiaojun
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.03.005
Changsha Pinggao Songya Lake Senior High School, Changsha, China; Guangzhou Institute of Science and Technology, Guangzhou, China
This study examines the linguistic strategies used in Sino-U.S. news reports on the 2020 closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston to construct verbal attacks and criticisms within political discourse. Drawing on a corpus of 18 articles from China Daily and The New York Times, we analyze how passivization and nominalization are employed as indirect strategies to attribute blame and challenge the legitimacy of the opposing nation’s actions. The research findings reveal that both media outlets use these linguistic features to obscure the agent of actions, yet with distinct rhetorical goals: China Daily uses them to criticize the U.S. for its “unjustified provocation”, while The New York Times uses them to justify the U.S. response to alleged Chinese “espionage activities”. This article argues that these linguistic strategies are not neutral but serve as powerful media for conducting verbal attacks in a globally interconnected political landscape, where direct confrontation is often avoided in favor of more subtle discursive practices.
verbal attacks, political discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), passivization, nominalization, Sino-U.S. relations
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