A Pragmatic Analysis Of Proximization In American Public Discourse

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),which is different from the previous studies,is centered on the relationships among language,power and ideologies,lexical-grammatical forms,meanings of the discourse and how the forms and meanings are produced.It reveals how social structure and power structure influence the interaction between ideologies and discourses.Proximization is a relatively new concept in linguistics.The verbal forms‘‘proximize'',‘‘proximizing''(i.e.bringing [conceptually] closer),are first found in Chilton(2004),and Cap established Proximization Theory on the basis of Chilton' s framework.In its most general and practical sense,proximization is a discursive strategy of presenting physically and temporally distant events and states of affairs(including ‘‘distant'' adversarial ideologies)as increasingly and negatively consequential to the speaker and her addressee.Proximization Theory,which is regarded as a framework to CDA,is theoretically and practically valuable.Considering the originality of this pioneering theory,this study analyzes the pragmatic strategies used in the first State of the Union Address by President Trump from the perspective of Proximization Theory by means of qualitative methods supplemented with quantitative methods.This paper thereby analyzes the pragmatic strategies in the excerpts in the State of Union Address.Through this research,it is found that: First,Trump uses spatial proximization in the subjects of antiterrorism,closing the border and boycotting Obamacare;second,he uses temporal proximization in the subjects of appealing to all the Americans to put the national interest at the first place;third,he uses axiological proximization in the subjects of appealing to all the Americans to unite to fight against national secessionism.The above-mentioned pragmatic strategies win public content and pave the way for the further implementation of policies for Trump.This study concludes and summarizes the linguistic forms of proximization,investigating how the speaker in the politic speech controls the audience through pragmatic strategies,which provides some kind of reference for CDA and predicting the right-winged tendency of the ideologies of America.