ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1598041
Reframing China in U.S. Trade Policy Discourse: A Context-Deictic Space Model for Ideological Positioning
Provisionally accepted
- College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
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China trade tensions have reshaped global economic relations and produced a discursive struggle over identity, threat, and legitimacy. While research in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Cognitive Linguistics (CCL) has examined ideological framing, few studies have systematically modeled how diplomatic discourse constructs shifting representations over time. This study proposes the Context-Deictic Space Model (CDSM), a socio-cognitive framework integrating van Dijk's Context Model with Chilton's Deictic Space Theory. By mapping participants, settings, and events onto spatial, temporal, and axiological axes, CDSM visualizes ideological positioning in discourse. Applied to three U.S. Trade Policy Agendas (2017-2019), the analysis shows how China is reframed from a distant trade partner to a proximate adversary, invoking crisis and legitimizing protectionism while marginalizing actors like the WTO. Theoretically, the study extends CCL by offering a visualizable model of ideological distance; empirically, it provides a new lens for analyzing threat construction in political discourse.
Keywords: Context model, Deictic Space Theory, critical discourse analysis, social cognition, Political discourse
Received: 22 Mar 2025; Accepted: 03 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 HU and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ying HU, College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, Shandong Province, China
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