Interpersonal Prominence and International Presence: Implicitness Constructed and Translated in Diplomatic Discourse

Interpersonal Prominence and International Presence focuses on the construction and translation of diplomatic discourse (DD) for conveying a message suggesting uncertainty and capable of being read in a number of ways. After a summary and an analysis of its characteristics, the book provides a definition of DD, showing that implicit DD is marked with an interpersonal prominence among its three meta-functions from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The book then gives a definition of implicitness, proposes a lexical model and identifies Lexicogrammatical Metaphor (LGM) as the linguistic mechanism of generating implicitness in DD via intralingual translation, and if necessary, interlingual translation. After this, a case study of DD generated around the 2001 Sino-US Air Collision incident is provided, which is used to establish a descriptive and explanatory three-dimensional model that is capable of providing textual accounts of translational treatments in intralingually configuring implicitness in DD and interlingually re-expressing it. This model consists of three components, namely linguistic composition, interactional dynamics, and perlocutionary imaging. Among them, perlocutionary imaging prevails over the other two in constructing and translating implicitness in DD.