Piotr Cap

The Language of Fear

This opening chapter contains an interdisciplinary discussion on the nature of threat and fear and how they affect the audience in public discourse. It introduces relevant theoretical concepts, such as coercion, legitimization and delegitimization. It demonstrates that threatening visions and anticipations appeal to the public as long as they are considered personally consequential. This socio-psychological premise is taken as a prerequisite for the development of Proximization Theory.

CROSSING SYMBOLIC DISTANCES IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE SPACE

This paper shows how an apparently abstract, ideologically loaded, evaluative rhetoric can be applied, legitimization-wise, to compensate for diminishing effects of fear appeal rhetoric based on material premises. The paper draws on proximization theory, which accounts for the construal of relations between entities within the Discourse Space (DS), esp. the shifts whereby the peripheral elements of the DS get construed as the central ones. Proximization recognizes the fundamental role of spatial cognition in constructing discursive representations of processes, attitudes and values in relation to the deictic center of the speaker. It focuses on spatially and axiologically grounded rhetorical choices, defining their interplay in temporally extensive discourses. Proximization is thus ideally suited to explain complex phenomena of evaluative rhetoric in interventionist macro-discourse, especially the mechanism whereby axiological argument compensates for spatially grounded discourse patterns which over time lose their rhetorical force. The analysis of the US 2003-2004 rhetoric of the Iraq war demonstrates how ‘axiological proximization’ maintains legitimization after other legitimization strategies involving strong fear appeals have become ineffective. Specifically, it reveals how the US redefined the case for the war in ideological terms following loss of the original premise (the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).

Proximization Theory and Critical Discourse Studies: A Promising Connection?

The goal of this paper is to show how proximization theory, a recent cognitive-pragmatic model of crisis and threat construction, can be applied in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). It is argued that the rapidly growing, intergeneric field of CDS is in need of new, interdisciplinary methodologies that will allow it to account for an increasingly broader spectrum of discourses, genres and thematic domains. Thus, proximization theory is used as a candidate methodological tool to handle three sample discourses—health, environment, modern technology—with a view to further applications. The results seem promising: the theory elucidates well the key features of public discourses within the CDS scope, for instance legitimization patterns in policy communication. Equally promising seem the prospects for proximization theory itself to continue to draw empirically from the expanding CDS territory.

‘We don’t want any immigrants or terrorists here’: The linguistic manufacturing of xenophobia in the post-2015 Poland:

This article explores the discursive patterns of legitimization of anti-immigration policies adopted by the Polish right-wing government which has been ruling the country since October 2015. It argues that legitimization of anti-immigration policies is essentially threat-based and coercive, involving a specific selection of rhetorical tools deployed to characterize different immigrant groups and individual immigrants from mainly Middle East and East African territories. Construed as ‘different’, ‘alien’ and ‘unbelonging’, in a whole lot of cultural, ideological and religious terms, they are claimed to pose an emerging threat to the safety of Poland and the personal safety and well-being of Polish citizens. The article draws on discourse space models and Proximization Theory in particular, revealing how the concepts of closeness and remoteness are manipulated in the service of threat construction and the sanctioning of tough anti-immigration measures, such as the refusal to accept non-Christian refugees from war territories in Syria. It demonstrates how Poland’s government manufactures and discursively perpetuates the aura of fear by conflating the issue of refugee migration into Europe with the problem of global terrorism, and how virtual threats to Polish cultural legacy and values are conceived to justify the government’s opposition to the idea of the multiethnic and multicultural state in general.

From ‘cultural unbelonging’ to ‘terrorist risk’: communicating threat in the Polish anti-immigration discourse

ABSTRACT The present paper analyses the anti-immigration discourse in Poland in terms of Proximization Theory (PT). PT [Cap, P. (2008). Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 17–41; Cap, P. (2010). Axiological aspects of proximization. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 392–407; Cap, P. (2013). Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Cap, P. (2017). The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; among others] is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. It reveals how top public actors construe closeness of an external threat, to claim leadership and solicit legitimization of preventive measures to offset the effects of the threat. The present paper applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today’s Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures.

Technological Discourse: Threats in the Cyberspace

This chapter demonstrates that the original terrain of Proximization Theory, anti-terrorist discourse, has expanded to blend with other domains, such as discourse of cyberspace. Originally a mundane technological discourse, the discourse of cyberspace has changed dramatically after 9/11, incorporating fear-inducing alerts to the possibility of cyberattacks. The chapter shows that, today, the discourse of cyberspace has virtually turned into the discourse of cyberthreat, reflecting general context of uncertainty and common anxiety following the WTC and the Pentagon terrorist attacks. It includes a variety of proximization strategies which construe ‘clear and present’ threats in order to trigger public mobilization and response.

Immigration and Anti-migration Discourses: The Early Rhetoric of Brexit

The focus of this last chapter is on immigration, a theme that has been salient in public discourse of the modern UK, especially the ‘Brexit’ rhetoric, where it encroached on issues of national sovereignty, democracy and economic prosperity. The chapter shows that the British immigration discourse is to a large extent a discourse of uncertainty and ever-growing anxiety, as well as xenophobia and hatred, involving a strong Self–Other distinction and organized ways of othering. It relies on discursively constructed threat and fear generation mechanisms, such as proximization, which perform a coercive function. The chapter analyses data from state political and media discourses, including speeches by David Cameron and Nigel Farage, as well as newspaper editorials and commentaries.

Follow-ups in the US anti-terrorist discourse: Proposal for a macro-discursive approach to monologic follow-up sequences

Follow-ups have been routinely considered a dialogic/conversational phenomenon. In this article, I demonstrate that the concept of follow-up could be extended to cover monologic discourses as well, especially those in which the speaker realizes a macro-goal over a number of texts produced in different contextual conditions. These dynamically evolving conditions make the speaker – as happens in dialogue – continually update and redefine his or her rhetorical choices to maintain realization of the macro-goal intact. Such an approach subsumes a ‘dialogic’ relation between the speaker and the shifting discourse context – rather than between the speaker and his or her specific interlocutor – and views follow-up as an instance of rhetoric that has been forcibly modified from the previous/initial instance, to keep enacting the speaker’s macro-goal against requirements of the new context. As an illustration, I show how monologic follow-ups work in George W. Bush’s War-on-Terror discourse. In particular, I discuss how the macro-goal of Bush’s 2003–2004 rhetoric of the Iraq War (legitimization of the pre-emptive military strike and the later US involvement) has been maintained in the ‘follow-up speeches’ responding to loss of the initial legitimization premise, that is, the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Pragmatics, Micropragmatics, Macropragmatics

Pragmatics, Micropragmatics, Macropragmatics The paper addresses the distinction between micropragmatics and macropragmatics. It is postulated that this differentiation, a consequence of a number of controversies surrounding the core field of pragmatics, does manifest a number of conceptual merits and methodological feasibility. The article also aims to elaborate on the four concepts central to the methodology of pragmatics, i.e. deixis, presupposition, implicature and speech acts, from an essentially ‘micropragmatic’ perspective, describing their contribution to the proposition of an utterance, its illocutionary force, and a wide range of effects the utterance may produce. At the same time, however, three relativities-regularities are indicated and presented as prompts for an integrated study of intentionality at the macro level of discourse/text.

Cognitive, Social and Psychological Issues of Public Discourse and Threat Communication

This opening chapter contains an interdisciplinary discussion on the nature of threat and fear and how they affect the audience in public discourse. It introduces relevant theoretical concepts, such as coercion, legitimization and delegitimization. It demonstrates that threatening visions and anticipations appeal to the public as long as they are considered personally consequential. This socio-psychological premise is taken as a prerequisite for the development of Proximization Theory.