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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:6 (2019) ► pp.870–892

Constructing threat through quotes and historical analogies in the Czech and the US “Ukraine Discourse”

ORCID logo | Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Conflicts and their discursive representations involve, apart from the spacio-temporal dimension, also the socio-ideological and axiological positions. These prompt the desired emotional response from the audience in a form of authorization for the intended action. All these dimensions are mainly construed by presenting series of assertions by creating the dichotomy self-other and by triggering implicatures that contribute to the preferred interpretations of the presented representations. This paper aims to examine the role of quotes and historical analogies triggered by quotes in discourse, concretely, it focuses on the way the Ukrainian conflict is proximized in the US and the Czech political discourse, namely in the parliamentary debates and governmental statements (November 2013–December 2014). The theoretical framework applied is the proximization approach (Cap 2008, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2017) which is complemented by the studies that explore the pragmatic functions of quoting in discourse.

Keywords: Ukraine conflict, proximization, quotes, historical analogies, Czech, English, parliamentary debates, governmental statements
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Political background of the Ukraine Conflict (2013–2014)
  • 3.Theoretical background
    • 3.1Proximization theory
    • 3.2Proximization theory, historical analogies and quotes
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Method and text corpus
    • 4.3Analytical findings
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18002.ber
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