The Ideological Functions of the Disclaim Resources in Press Conferences

In Critical Discourse Analysis, appraisal system has been of ideological interest because it concerns the language expression closely related to values. When answering questions in press conference, many appraisal resources are used by speakers to express their own stances on important issues and persuade the journalists and the public. This article focuses on the disclaim resources within the appraisal framework, and analyzes their ideological functions in press conferences. Specifically, using a corpus of 100 transcriptions of press conferences as data, this study investigates the discursive function of disclaim and stance-taking realized by disclaim in press conferences from an ideological dimension. It can be found that deny is always widely employed together with counter to reject and replace the point of view, and thus realize the discourse function of counter-expectancy and information modification. Through disclaim, such evaluative stances, including but not limited to reminding, warning, dissuading, prohibiting, questioning, opposing, refusing and criticizing are expressed. The stance-taking realized by disclaim could help the speaker to show his or her positions in a more covert way, so as to establish and maintain power relationships. Therefore, the employment of disclaim in press conferences really carries strong ideological implications and the thorough analysis of the disclaim resources could provide some implications for Critical Discourse Analysis. Besides, from the study we can see that spokesman could use a lot of language resources to emphasize his or her own stances, and thus to convince the audience. Therefore, this study could provide some implications for spokesman of press conferences, especially for government spokesman to effectively communicate with the audience and achieve a more harmonious communication.