Proximization: The Pragmatics Of Symbolic Distance Crossing (pragmatics & Beyond New Series)
by Piotr Cap /
2013 / English / PDF
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This book proposes a new theory (“proximization theory”) in the
area of political/public legitimization discourse. Located at the
intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and critical
approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of broadly
consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive
interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced
construals of virtual external threats encroaching upon the speaker
and her audience’s home territory. The construals, which proceed
along spatial, temporal and axiological lines, are forced by
strategic deployment of lexico-grammatical choices drawn from the
three domains. This proposal is illustrated primarily in the
in-depth analysis of the 2001-2010 US discourse of the
War-on-Terror, and secondarily in a number of pilot studies
pointing to a wide range of further applications (environmental
discourse, health communication, cyber-threat discourse, political
party-representation). The theory and the empirical focus of the
book will appeal to researchers working on interdisciplinary
projects in Pragmatics, Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Critical
Discourse Studies, as well as Journalism and Media Studies.
This book proposes a new theory (“proximization theory”) in the
area of political/public legitimization discourse. Located at the
intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and critical
approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of broadly
consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive
interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced
construals of virtual external threats encroaching upon the speaker
and her audience’s home territory. The construals, which proceed
along spatial, temporal and axiological lines, are forced by
strategic deployment of lexico-grammatical choices drawn from the
three domains. This proposal is illustrated primarily in the
in-depth analysis of the 2001-2010 US discourse of the
War-on-Terror, and secondarily in a number of pilot studies
pointing to a wide range of further applications (environmental
discourse, health communication, cyber-threat discourse, political
party-representation). The theory and the empirical focus of the
book will appeal to researchers working on interdisciplinary
projects in Pragmatics, Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Critical
Discourse Studies, as well as Journalism and Media Studies.