Abstract:

Discourse is a social practice with the constructive power. The modernization of national governance can be constructed with the effective discourse system. This paper conducts a corpus-based analysis on register features of Chinese and US press briefings on COVID-19 by utilizing MD approach. The analysis of the six dimensions shows that Chinese press briefings are featured by formal and written learned exposition through providing sufficient official and authoritative information, but avoiding emotional linguistic expressions and interactions; whereas US press briefings are characteristic of spoken involved persuasion manifested by highly engaged interactions but deviating from the central topic of epidemic, thus lacking required information and policy discourse. This study has the implications that there is a need to improve Chinese spokespersons' capabilities of discursive construction and practices of multimodal semiotics so as to promote international discourse communication and national governance.

Key words: COVID-19; press briefing, register, MD approach, national governance