Abstract
The conflict in Ukraine has been in the focus of the international politics for the last four years. The fact that it takes place not only on the battlefield but also in form of a discursive war has become strikingly evident. An inherent part of a conflict construction is the legitimization of one’s own positions and actions. According to Chilton (2017: 237, see also Chilton 2004, 2014), the discursive construction of events is “fundamentally grounded in spatial cognition, projected at various levels of abstraction and intimately bound up with human social relations”. This idea is crucial to “the systematic rhetorical arrangement” known as proximization (Cap 2008, 2013, 2017). It aims to “picture the occurring events and their actors as directly affecting the addressee” (Cap 2008, 2013, 2017). It is “a discursive tool [that allows] for the reduction of the temporal, spatial, axiological, cognitive [epistemic] and emotional distance” (Kopytowska 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) between the speaker and his/her audience. This paper draws on these approaches and examines the modalities of the threat representation. Apart from the spatial-temporal grounding, the analysis dedicates a special attention to the axiological, epistemic and emotional dimensions which are projected into the modalities of construction of fear and the argumentative use of historical parallels. We examine the commonalities and the differences of the discursive construction of the Ukraine conflict in the US and the Czech official political discourses. The US discourse is rather transparent and homogenous with clearly defined positive –negative roles, values and actions within IDC and ODC. In contrast, the Czech “Ukraine discourse” is polyphonic and echoes both the Euro-Atlantic and the Russian way of thinking and value judgements, which leads quite inevitably to a discursive clash. Due to the cognitive and also physical closeness of the conflict, there is a lesser need to proximize the conflict in such a powerful and determined way as it is done in the US narrative.
About the author
Martina Berrocal is a Research Assistant in the Department of Slavonic and Caucasian Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Her research interests include political discourse, (im)politeness and spoken language
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Viktoria Kerry, Liudmila Arcimaviciene and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.
References
Arcimavičiene, Liudmila & Sercan Hamza Bağlama. forthcoming. Migration, metaphor and myth in the US and UK media representations: The ideological dichotomy of "them" and "us". Sage Open.Search in Google Scholar
Averre, Derek & Kataryna Wolczuk. 2016. Introduction: The Ukraine crisis and post-post-cod war Europe. Europe-Asia Studies 68(4). 551–555.10.1080/09668136.2016.1176690Search in Google Scholar
Bealey, Frank & Allan G. Johnson. 1999. The Blackwell dictionary of political science: A user’s guide to its terms. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Search in Google Scholar
Baider, Fabienne H & Maria Constantinou. 2014. Language of cyber-politics: "Imaging/imagining" communities". Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 10(2). 213–243.10.1515/lpp-2014-0012Search in Google Scholar
Baider, Fabienne H. 2017. Thinking globally, acting locally. Analyzing the adaptation of mainstream supremacist concepsts to a local socio-historical context (ELAM in Cyprus). Journal of Aggression and Conflict 5(2). 179–207.Search in Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika. 2006. Epistemological positioning and evidentiality in English news discourse: A text-driven approach. Text and Talk 26(6). 635–660.10.1515/TEXT.2006.027Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr (ed.). 2005. Pragmatics today. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2008. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 40(1). 17–41.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.002Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2010. Legitimisation in political discourse: A Cross-disciplinary perspective on the modern US war rhetoric, 2nd edn. Newcastle upon Thyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2013. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.10.1075/pbns.232Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2014. Applying cognitive pragmatics to Critical Discourse Studies: A proximization analysis of three public space discourses. Journal of Pragmatics 70. 16–30.10.1016/j.pragma.2014.05.008Search in Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2017. The Language of fear: Communicating Threat in public discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1Search in Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2017. Fire metaphors. Discourses of awe and authority. London/New York: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203561218Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2010. The conceptual structure of deontic meaning: A model based on geometrical principles. Language and Cognition 2(2). 191–220.10.1515/langcog.2010.008Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2014. Language, space and mind. The conceptual geomentry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511845703Search in Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2017. Toward a neuro-cognitive model of socio-political discourse, and an application to the populist discourse of Donald Trump. Langage et société 2(160–61). 237–49.10.3917/ls.160.0237Search in Google Scholar
Galeotti, Mark. 2016. Hybrid, ambiguous, and non-linear? How new is Russia’s ‘new weay of war'? Small Wars & Insurgencies 27(2). 282–301.10.1080/09592318.2015.1129170Search in Google Scholar
Guttke, Matthias. 2015. Wem gehört die Krim? Putins Rechtfertigung der Krim-Annexion. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 60(2). 312–327.10.1515/slaw-2015-0021Search in Google Scholar
Havlik, Peter. 2014. Economic consequences of the Ukraine conflict, wiiw policy notes. Wien: Wiener Institut für International Wirschaftsvergleiche.Search in Google Scholar
Hellman, Maria & Charlotte Wagnsson. 2017. How can European states respond to Russian inforamation warfare? An analytical framework. European Security 26. 153–170.10.1080/09662839.2017.1294162Search in Google Scholar
Holý, Ladislav. 2010. Malý český člověk a skvélý český ndrod. Praha: Slon.Search in Google Scholar
Kholodilin, Konstantin, Dirk Ulbricht & Georg Wagner. 2014. Are economic sanctions against Russia effective? Berlin: Deutsches Institut für WirtschaftsforschungSearch in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2013. Blogging as the mediatization of politics and a new form of social interaction. In Piotr Cap & Urszula Okulska (eds.), Analyzing genres in political communication, 379–421. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/dapsac.50.15kopSearch in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015a. Covering conflict: Between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse, genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics 7. 308–339.10.1163/18773109-00702007Search in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015b. Ideology of ‘here’ and ‘now’. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3). 347–365.10.1080/17405904.2015.1013485Search in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015c. Mediating identity, ideology and values in the public sphere: Towards a new model of (constructed) social reality. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 11 (2). 133–156.10.1515/lpp-2015-0008Search in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika & Lukasz Grabowski. 2017. European security under threat: mediating the crisis and constructing the Other. In Christian Karner and Monika Kopytowska (eds.), National identity and Europe in times of crisis: Doing and undoing Europe, 83–112. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.10.1108/978-1-78714-513-920171005Search in Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika, Lukasz Grabowski & Julita Woźniak. 2017. Mobilizing the Other: Cyberhate, refugee crisis and proximization. In Monika Kopytowska (ed.), Contemporary discourses of hate and radicalism across space and genres, 57–97. Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins.10.1075/bct.93.11kopSearch in Google Scholar
Lichy, Marta. 2015. Metaphor and proximisation in the analysis of the discourse of indirect threat - a study of the US rhetoric on the Russia-Ukraine conflict (Doctoral Thesis). Institute of English Studies: University of ŁódźSearch in Google Scholar
Mynárik, Ján. 1989. The nationality question in Czechoslovakia and the 1938 Munich agreement. In Norman Stone & El Strouhal (eds.), Czechoslovakia: Crossroads and crises, 1918–88, 89–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1007/978-1-349-10644-8_6Search in Google Scholar
Nedashkivska, Alla. 2015. "Ukraine is united" campaign: Public discourse on languages in Ukraine at atime of political turmoil. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 60(2). 294–331.10.1515/slaw-2015-0020Search in Google Scholar
Pehe, Jiří. 1999. Souvislosti domácí a zahraniční politiky.Mezinárodní vztahy 34(2). 64–73.Search in Google Scholar
Roberts, Geoffrey. 1999. Ideology, calculation and improvisation: Spheres of influence and soviet foreign policy 1939-1945. Review of International Studies 25(4). 655–673.10.1017/S0260210599006555Search in Google Scholar
Rotaru, Vasile. 2017. Forced Attraction. How Russia is instrumentlizing its soft power source in the near abroad. Problems of Post-Communism (Online).1–12.10.1080/10758216.2016.1276400Search in Google Scholar
Sempa, Francis. 2002. Geopolitics. From the cold war to the 21th century. New Brunswick US/London: Transaction Publishers.Search in Google Scholar
Volvach, Natalia. 2016. Annexion oder freiwilliger Beitritt? Kritische Diskursanalyse der ukrainischen und russischen Medienberichterstattung über das Krim-Referendum (Master Thesis). Institute of German Studies, University of Bern.Search in Google Scholar
Weiss, Daniel. 2017. Implizite Argumentation im politischen Diskurs: Metaphern, Vergleiche, intertextuelle Verweise. In Anna Mayer & Liljana Reinkowski (eds.), Im Rhytmus der Linguistik. Festschrift für S. Kempgen, 465–483. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press.Search in Google Scholar
Weiss, Daniel. 2017 forthcoming. The Ukrainian nation: stepmother, younger sister, of stillborn baby?”.In Proceedings of the workshop Discourse of the national September 8th –9th, 2016, University of Oslo.Search in Google Scholar
Westlund, Fredrik & Johan Norberg. 2016. Military means for non-military measures: The Russian approach to the use of armed force as seen in Ukraine. The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 29(4). 576–601.10.1080/13518046.2016.1232560Search in Google Scholar
Wieczorek, Anna Ewa. 2008. Proximisation, common ground and assertion-based patterns for legitimisation in political discourse. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across disciplines 2(1). 31–48.Search in Google Scholar
Wieczorek, Anna Ewa. 2013. Clusivity: A new approach to association and dissociation in political discourse. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Search in Google Scholar
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
