Identity Construction of Members in the U.S. Technological Alliance in Think Tank Discourse: A Systemic Functional Perspective

The United States regards the formation of the technological alliance as a key initiative in its strategic competition with China, and think tank discourse profoundly influences the decision-making of the U.S. government. This study takes the transitivity system and the appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics as the semantic analysis framework and selects reports from leading American think tanks as the corpus to investigate identity construction of members in the U.S. technological alliance. The identity construction trends of these members are as follows: the United States as “anxious initiator”, “indispensable leader”, and “primary beneficiary”, allies as “principal contributor” and “ambivalent participant”, other countries as “desirable collaborator” and “subordinate participant”, commercial organizations as “passive cooperator”, and the academia as “uneasy innovator”. The study aims to make linguistic contributions to deconstructing the internal mechanism of the formation and operation of the U.S. technological alliance.