Article published in:
Towards Culture(s) of Dialogue: Communicating Unity and Diversity through Language and Discourse
Edited by Urszula Okulska, Grzegorz Kowalski and Urszula Topczewska
[Language and Dialogue 12:2] 2022
► pp. 218–244

Proximization and dialogue in Internet news texts and comments

| University of Warsaw

The paper presents the results of an empirical study on proximization approached as a dialogue between journalists and readers of Internet media texts and online comments. In this way the paper shows a practical application of the research programme, whose tenets I presented elsewhere (Kowalski 2018), in relation to Polish and Romanian reciprocal media coverage on the winter 2016/2017 protests in the two countries, and follow-up online comments. The analysis shows that participants used proximization for different communicative purposes (descriptive or evaluative), for which they employed different reportoires of proximization strategies (categorization, domestication, construing hybrid IDC/ODC worlds, historical analogies, and references to cultural stereotypes). As a result, there was no consensus on a shared Discourse Space, and alternative Discourse Spaces were negotiated in the online dialogue.

Keywords: proximization, dialogue, media discourse, online comments, Discourse Space, Romania, Poland
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theory and literature review
    • 2.1Proximization theory
    • 2.2Proximization and dialogicity in news discourse
    • 2.3Discourse strategies of proximization
  • 3.Materials
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Reciprocal media coverage of Poland and Romania
    • 3.3Summary of 2016/2017 protests in Poland and Romania
  • 4.Analysis: Discourse strategies of proximization in Polish and Romanian Internet media texts and media texts’ comments
    • 4.1Categorization
    • 4.2Domestication
    • 4.3Hybrid IDC/ODC worlds
    • 4.4Historical analogies
    • 4.5Dialogue with stereotypes
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 08 August 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00123.kow
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