(1) Do annual MPPRC focus on similar things?

(2) How does the Department of Defense of the United States represent China’s military power from the perspective of the discourse study?

(3) What is the intention(s) behind the representation?

1.4 Organization of the Study

The organization of the entire thesis is as follows:

Chapter one is the general introduction of the study, consisting of the background, significance and aims.

Chapter two mainly reviews the previous studies of MPPRC from semantic prosody and cultural discourse studies with their definition, motivation, and functions. Then the thesis points out the major problem in the previous studies and further proposes some perspectives of the present study.

Chapter three is a description of the tool, data collection, research methodology and procedure adopted in this thesis. Then the author introduces the collection of data, and the steps for the study.

Chapter Four is the central part of the whole thesis. In this part, the study will firstly discuss the similarities and differences of the 8 years’ reports. Then, the study will focus on the semantic prosody of high-frequency words and the cultural discourse studies.

Chapter Five, as the concluding part, summarizes the major findings, points out the limitations of the thesis and provides suggestions for further study.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Previous studies on semantic prosody

2.1.1 Previous Studies on semantic prosody abroad

Semantic prosody is put forward by John Sinclair (2003) when he was investigating lexical language environment. Sinclair made an analogy with prosody which is proposed by Firth (1957) who referred to it as phonological color which is beyond segmental boundaries. Sinclair defined semantic prosody as a phenomenon that node word is influenced by collocations. He thought that it was semantic that was relevant to meaning, and it was prosody because it involved collocations of several words (Sinclair, 2003: 117). However, it was Bill Louw (1993) who made semantic prosody be well known in the academic world. He was the first to use semantic prosody in his paper Irony in the Text or Insincerely in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosody in 1993. He defined this notion as ‘A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is referred to in this paper as a semantic prosody.” After Sinclair and Louw, several experts participated in the researches on semantic prosody, such as Stubbs (1995a; 2001), Bublitz (1996), Hoey (2005), Whitsitt (2005), Hunston (2007), Stewart (2010).