A Two-Tiered Analysis of Chinese Political Discourse: The Case of Xi Jinping’s Commemorative Speech for the Centennial of the CCP

This paper proposes a discourse analysis of the speech delivered by President Xi Jinping during the ceremony celebrating the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at Tian’anmen Square in Beijing on 1 July 2021. We propose a two-tiered analysis that intersects the disambiguation of the modal expressions on necessity and possibility with the identification and scrutiny of the most frequent lexical items, aimed at identifying their specific usages, semantic features and regularities in terms of collocates and collocations. In order to quantify the occurrences of the vocabulary employed by the speaker, we used the corpus query tool in Sketch Engine and created a corpus consisting of 3606 Chinese words out of the total 7275 Chinese characters comprised in the speech.