A Study On Legitimization In Political Discourse From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

In political discourse,speakers usually employ various discourse strategies to legitimize their goals,actions and policies.As an important vehicle of political games among major political powers,human rights discourse plays a fundamental role in shifting political narratives.Therefore,how to achieve the legitimization of human rights discourse remains one of the main goals of major powers.Recent years have witnessed a growing interdisciplinary trend in the development of critical discourse analysis.By integrating Cap’s Proximization Theory with van Dijk’s Social Cognitive Model,Chinese scholar Wu Jianguo(2018)proposed an analytical model of legitimization used in political discourse,which strengthens the explanatory power of this theory.The study analyzes the legitimization of human rights reports from two dimensions:discourse construction and discourse construal.By building a comparable corpus,this study takes out the key lexical-grammatical items of each proximization strategy,and the frequency of each item is counted through the Antconc software.Then,it explains how the legitimization strategy is used to legitimize the policy or action from three dimensions: spatial,temporal and axiological dimensions in each discourse.Finally,the discourse construal of legitimization is studied from a socio-cognitive perspective.The study shows that,first of all,in spatial proximization,the U.S.government attempts to neutralize its political stance by using non-sovereign entities such as international organizations and individuals as agents of actions and excluding itself from the discourse.The Chinese government,on the other hand,uses unequivocal referents in stating its political position.While this demonstrates its determination to defend the sovereignty of its national discourse,it also reflects a relatively passive and defensive state in human rights discourse.Secondly,in temporal proximization,the U.S.government adopts abstract concepts,assumptions or groundless predictions to magnify uncertainty and create a sense of fear.The Chinese government focuses on past events and presents facts to create a sense of crisis.Finally,in the axiological dimension,the two governments both use opposing ideologies and values to construct their own positive images and the other’s negative images to achieve legitimization in human rights discourse.This study enriches the discussion of legitimization of human rights discourse,and also provides a reference for future studies along this line of research.