Analyzing Legitimization In Political Discourse From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

The study of political language started from the study of political rhetoric in ancient Greece.From the point of linguistics,the study of political discourse began in the 1980 s,when linguists began to apply critical discourse analysis to political discourse analysis.In recent years,critical discourse analysis has become an increasingly important method of discourse analysis.Linguists have combined various disciplines such as psychology and sociology with critical discourse analysis in order to explain how discourse is produced.Thus,Piotr Cap proposed the proximization theory to account for the cognitive mechanisms of language.Proximization theory plays a key role in the study of political discourse as a corpus to explore how policies or behavior are legitimized.This paper applies proximization theory to analyze legitimization of COVID-19 discourse generated by the Trump administration.COVID-19 discourse vilified China in order to achieve the Trump administration’s political intentions.In early 2020,the Trump administration claimed that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan,China,and then spread around the world.The Trump administration blamed China for COVID-19,renamed the novel coronavirus as “…the Chinese Virus…,” and began urging the world to criticize China in order to use COVID-19 as a political tool that would benefit the Trump administration while creating maximum harm to China.Studying COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration can well reflect how the Trump administration legitimizes its political discourse and reveals its political motives.This paper poses three questions:(1)what are the lexical and grammatical features of COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration?(2)how did the Trump administration legitimize its own behavior through spatial,temporal and axiological proximization strategies?(3)what political intentions were hidden behind COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration?To answer these three questions,the author examined a total of 39 COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration,mainly from March to May,2020.Discourse is retrieved from the U.S.State Department website,and totaled 50,266 words.Based on the corpus collected from this website,the author created a corpus.The author combined illustrative examples to analyze the corpus quantitatively and qualitatively.With respect to the first question,the findings revealed three distinct lexical and grammatical features of COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration:(1)the United States is the center of the discourse space;(2)action verbs and abstract nouns indicated that the outside-the-deictic-center(ODC)encroached upon the insidethe-deictic-center(IDC),which manifestation aided the Trump administration in communicating that the novel coronavirus discovered in China posed threats to American economic and life security;(3)the words that indicated the values of IDC are positive and complimentary,and the words that indicated the values of ODC are negative and derogatory.The second question,regarding the process by which the Trump administration legitimized its own behavior,was examined by applying(A)spatial,(B)temporal,and(C)axiological proximization strategies.(A)Applying the spatial proximization strategy,the author identifies two sets of opposing entities,i.e.,ODC and IDC,and focuses on the threat and influence of ODC to IDC,i.e.,China threatens life and economic security of America and the world,so that hostility of America and the world toward China deepened,and thus legitimized COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration.(B)Using the temporal proximization strategy,the author finds that the past-topresent conceptual shift was more often used and was applied to presuppose that the threats from ODC would continue into the future.The Trump administration has made Americans and people around the world feel the seriousness of the threats posed by China by portraying China as wreaking havoc on the world.These threats pose a significant danger to the U.S.economy and life safety,and they continue into the future,thus legitimizing COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration.(C)The author uses the axiological proximization strategy to analyze legitimization of discourse,by contrasting noun phrases denoting positive and negative values.This contrast highlighted the opposition between ODC and IDC,and thereby served to legitimize COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration.The third question sought to uncover the political intentions behind COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration: it was intended to mislead people by using disingenuous language,and outright lies,create confusion,and ultimately lead people not to distinguish right from wrong.By pushing the “presumption of guilt”approach,the Trump administration attempted to convict and discredit China without evidence.By blaming China for COVID-19,the Trump administration attempted to create and push a global perception that China is a threat,and must be suppressed and contained,thus escaping accusations of the American people for the poor leadership of Trump himself and his administration in preventing and controlling COVID-19.This paper uses proximization theory to analyze legitimization of COVID-19 discourse on China from the Trump administration.Proximization theory is a recently constructed platform for linguistic analysis that is rapidly attracting the interest of linguists around the world.However,it has not been extensively studied in China.Therefore,the study of this paper may make a small contribution to the development of proximization theory in China,and may provide a reference for the study of other discourse.In addition,this paper provides a practical reference for China to rebuild its image as a responsible great power and win the right to speak in disputes.