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In:Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 115–136

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Chapter 5
Aspects of threat construction in the Polish anti-immigration discourse

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 7 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.06cap
Abstract
Proximization Theory (PT) (Cap 2008, 2010, 2013, 2017; among others) is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. This article applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today's Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse space: Cognitive representations and the forcing of worldviews
    • 2.1Deictic Space Theory (DST)
    • 2.2Proximization Theory (PT)
  • 3.Threat construction in the L&J discourse: From ‘cultural unbelonging’ to ‘terrorist risk’
    • 3.1The corpus for analysis
    • 3.2The US
    • 3.3The THEM
    • 3.4The THEM against US proximization scenario
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (26)
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Cited by one other publication

Kisić, Jelena Jorgačević & Aleksandra Salamurović
2023. Migration Discourse in Serbian Media – Analysis of National Dailies Politika, Danas and Vecernje novosti. In The Representation of REFUGEES and MIGRANTS in European National Media Discourses from 2015 to 2017 [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo

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