Chapter published in:
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 115–136

Chapter 5
Aspects of threat construction in the Polish anti-immigration discourse

Proximization Theory (PT) (Cap 2008, 2010, 2013, 2017; 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. This article 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.
Keywords: anti-immigration discourse, Poland, Law & Justice Party, threat construction, legitimization, proximization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse space: Cognitive representations and the forcing of worldviews
    • 2.1Deictic Space Theory (DST)
    • 2.2Proximization Theory (PT)
  • 3.Threat construction in the L&J discourse: From ‘cultural unbelonging’ to ‘terrorist risk’
    • 3.1The corpus for analysis
    • 3.2The US
    • 3.3The THEM
    • 3.4The THEM against US proximization scenario
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 07 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.06cap
References
Cap, Piotr
2006 Legitimization in Political Discourse: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
2008 “Towards the Proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 17–41. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 “Axiological aspects of Proximization.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 392–407. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017 The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul
2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2005 “Discourse space theory: Geometry, brain and shifting viewpoints.” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3: 78–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chovanec, Jan
2010 “Legitimation through Differentiation: Discursive Construction of Jacques Le Worm Chirac as an Opponent to Military Action.” In Perspectives in Politics and Discourse, ed. By Urszula Okulska, and Piotr Cap, 61–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cienki, Alan, Bertie Kaal, and Isa Maks
2010 “Mapping World View in Political Texts Using Discourse Space Theory: Metaphor as an Analytical Tool.” Paper presented at RaAM 8 conference, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Dunmire, Patricia
2011 Projecting the Future through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Festinger, Leon
1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Filardo Llamas Laura
2010 “Discourse Worlds in Northern Ireland: The Legitimisation of the 1998 Agreement.” In Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution. Debating Peace in Northern Ireland, ed. by Katy Hayward, and Catherine O'Donnell, 62–76. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2013 “Committed to the ideals of 1916. The language of paramilitary groups: The case of the Irish republican Army.” Critical Discourse Studies 10: 1–17. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Filardo Llamas, Laura Bertie Kaal, and Christopher Hart
(eds) 2015 Time, Space and Evaluation in Ideological Discourse. Special issue of Critical Discourse Studies (12).Google Scholar
Gavins, Joanna
2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher
2010 Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher, and Piotr Cap
(eds) 2014 Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell
1992 Propaganda and Persuasion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Kaal, Bertie
2012 “Worldviews: The spatial ground of political reasoning in Dutch election manifestos.” CADAAD 6: 1–22.Google Scholar
Levelt, William J.
1989 Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2003 Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mann, William, and Sandra Thompson
1988 “Rhetorical structure theory: A theory of text organization.” Text 8: 243–281. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas
2016 Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Werth, Paul
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar