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This book proposes a new theory ("proximization theory") in the area of political/public legitimization discourse. Located at the intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics and critical approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of broadly consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced construals of virtual external threats encroaching upon the speaker and her audience's home territory. The construals, which proceed along spatial, temporal and axiological lines, are forced by strategic deployment of lexico-gra

How did the G. W. Bush administration manage to persuade Americans to go to war in Iraq in March 2003? How was this intervention, and the global campaign named as "war-on-terror," legitimised linguistically? This book shows that the best legitimisation effects in political discourse are accomplished through the use of "proximization"-a cognitive-rhetorical strategy that draws on the speaker's ability to present events as directly and increasingly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative

The present chapter takes under scrutiny political blogs with a view to establishing their generic profile, both in terms of structure and functions. This relatively new genre in political communication is discussed in the context of "mediatization", a meta-process transforming the relationship between media, society and politics through creating a common spatiotemporal, cognitive and axiological sphere of shared experience, and supplementing the social activities which previously took place only face-to-face with virtual interaction. The study demonstrates that what makes this process possible is the mechanism of "proximization", allowing for the reduction of the temporal, spatial, axiological, cognitive and emotional distance between the blogger and his or her audience, and thus for the mediation of experience and the creation of a virtual community around the "networked public sphere." On the theoretical level, the chapter offers a new integrated approach towards the discourse of the political blogosphere, combining pragmatic and cognitive linguistic perspectives with insights from social semiotics and media studies. Quantitative (e.g. keyword analysis, concordance analysis, semantic vectors) and qualitative methods are used to explore "proximization dynamics" in political blogs written by active party politicians: the corpus of Polish- and English-language data comprises the two most prominent political blogs in each country along with their readers' comments from the left and right ends of the political spectrum.

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains - political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. - it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions concerning language itself. The twenty chapters in the volume, written by specialists in political linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and social psychology, address the diversity of political discourse to propose novel perspectives from which common analytic procedures can be drawn and followed. The volume is thus an essential resource for anyone looking for a coherent research agenda in explorations of political discourse as a point of reference for their own academic activities, both scholarly and didactic.