CHANGE OF IDEOLOGIES OF MACAO IN THE POST-HANDOVER PERIOD: A CORPUS-BASED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MACAO’S POLICY ADDRESSES
Lam Sut I/ City University of Macau, University of Macau
Policy addresses are important governmental documents that convey the government’s policies and publicize the government’s work plan set for the coming year, and at the same time, carry important information about social and economic developments. This paper studies the policy addresses of Macao SAR in the post-handover period from 2000 to 2017. It aims at investigating how the linguistic configurations reflect the ideologies constructed by the government in the post-handover period. With a corpus-assisted methodology, this paper applies discourse analysis to the investigation of the policy addresses given by the two chief executives of the four different terms of the Macao SAR government. The analysis shows that the diction in the policy addresses reflects the changes in the development of Macao and in the relationship between the government and the audience in the investigated period. It is argued that a corpus-assisted investigation can reveal how discourse is shaped by social practice and how discourse is used to help construct ideologies.
Key words: Macao, policy address, discourse analysis, ideologies, corpus
