Abstract
This chapter outlines the main tenets of Proximization Theory (PT). It defines proximization as a discursive strategy of presenting the apparently remote events and ideologies as increasingly consequential to the speaker and her addressee. Working with examples from the discourse of the War on Terror, it reveals how threatening visions are invoked to obtain legitimization of preventive actions and policies. The chapter proposes that the success of PT in describing legitimization patterns in state political discourse warrants its extended application to other discourses in the public domain.
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Notes
- 1.
The corpus contains 402 texts (601,856 words) of speeches and remarks, downloaded from the White House website http://www.whitehouse.gov in January 2011. It includes texts matching at least two of the three issue tags: defense, foreign policy, homeland security.
- 2.
See Cap (2013, pp. 108–109) for details. See also the two other frameworks, temporal (p. 116) and axiological (p. 122), which we do not have space to discuss here.
- 3.
The parts are quoted according to the chronology of the speech.
- 4.
Weapons of mass destruction.
- 5.
This is a secondary variant of axiological proximization. As will be shown, axiological proximization mostly involves the adversary (ODC); antagonistic values are ‘dormant’ triggers for a possible ODC impact.
- 6.
We have noted in Chap. 1 that the best credibility and thus legitimization effects can be expected if the speaker produces her message in line with the psychological, social, political, cultural, etc., predispositions of the addressee. However, since a full compliance is almost never possible, it is essential that a novel message is at least tentatively or partly acceptable; then, its acceptability and the speaker’s credibility tend to increase over time.
- 7.
The nominal phrase ‘[Iraq’s] programs for WMD’ is essentially an implicature able to legitimize, in response to contextual needs, any of the following inferences: ‘Iraq possesses WMD’, ‘Iraq is developing WMD’, ‘Iraq intends to develop WMD’, ‘Iraq intended to develop WMD’, and more. The phrase was among G.W. Bush’s rhetorical favourites in later stages of the Iraq war, when the original premises for war were called into question.
- 8.
See Hart and Cap (2014) for an overview of current work in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
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Cap, P. (2017). Proximization: A Threat-Based Model of Policy Legitimization. In: The Language of Fear. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_2
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