Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:6 (2019) ► pp.870–892

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Constructing threat through quotes and historical analogies in the Czech and the US “Ukraine Discourse”

ORCiD logo with link | Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Published online: 6 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18002.ber
Abstract
Conflicts and their discursive representations involve, apart from the spacio-temporal dimension, also the socio-ideological and axiological positions. These prompt the desired emotional response from the audience in a form of authorization for the intended action. All these dimensions are mainly construed by presenting series of assertions by creating the dichotomy self-other and by triggering implicatures that contribute to the preferred interpretations of the presented representations. This paper aims to examine the role of quotes and historical analogies triggered by quotes in discourse, concretely, it focuses on the way the Ukrainian conflict is proximized in the US and the Czech political discourse, namely in the parliamentary debates and governmental statements (November 2013–December 2014). The theoretical framework applied is the proximization approach (. 2008. “Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (1):17–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2010. “Axiological Aspects of Proximization”. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2): 392–407. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2013. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2014. “Applying cognitive pragmatics to Critical Discourse Studies: A proximization analysis of three public space discourses.” Journal of Pragmatics 701: 16–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2017. The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) which is complemented by the studies that explore the pragmatic functions of quoting in discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Political background of the Ukraine Conflict (2013–2014)
  • 3.Theoretical background
    • 3.1Proximization theory
    • 3.2Proximization theory, historical analogies and quotes
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Method and text corpus
    • 4.3Analytical findings
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
References
Antos, Gerd. 2017. “Fake News. Warum wir auf sie reinfallen. Oder: ‘Ich mach euch die Welt so wie mir gefällt’” Der Sprachdienst 17 (1):1–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika. 2006. “Epistemological positioning and evidentiality in English news discourse: A text-driven approach.” Text and Talk 26 (6): 635–660. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bell, Allan. 1991. The language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 2017. “Ukraine, Mainstream Media and Conflict Propaganda.” Journalism Studies 18 (8):1016–1034. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bublitz, Wolfram. 2015. “Introducing Quoting as a Ubiguitous Meta-communicative Act.” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, edited by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 1–26. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bublitz, Wolfram, and Christian Hoffmann. 2011. “‘Three Men Using our Toilet all Day Withour Flushing – This May be the Worst Sentences I’ve Ever Read’: Quoting CMC.” In Anglistentag Saarbrücken 2010. Proceedings, edited by Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker, 433–477. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr, ed. 2005. Pragmatics Today. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Legitimization in Political Discourse: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (1):17–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “Axiological Aspects of Proximization”. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2): 392–407. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “Applying cognitive pragmatics to Critical Discourse Studies: A proximization analysis of three public space discourses.” Journal of Pragmatics 701: 16–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Crossing Symbolic Distanes in Politcal Discourse Space.” Critical Discourse Studies 12 (3):313–329. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Language, Space and Mind. The Conceptual Geomentry of Linguistic Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “Toward a neuro-cognitive model of socio-political discourse, and an application to the populist discourse of Donald Trump.” Langage et societé 2017/2 (160–161): 237–249. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Richard J. Gerring. 1990. “Quotations as Demonstrations.” Language 66 (4): 764–805. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cvrček, Václav, and Masako Fidler. 2019. “More than Keywords: Discourse Prominence Analysis of the Russian Web Portal-Sputnik Czech Republic.” In Political discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe, edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurovič, 93–117. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gerber, Theodore P., and Jane Zavisca. 2016. “Does Russian Propaganda Work?” The Washington Quarterly 39 (2):79–98. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haran, Oleksiy, and Petro Burkovskiy. 2017. “Ukraine’s Foreign Policy and the Role of the West.” In Eastern Voices. Europe’s East Faces an Unsettled West, edited by Daniel S. Hamilton and Stefen Meister, 51–76. Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015a. “Covering Conflict: Between Universality and Cultural Specificity in News Discourse, Genre and Journalistic Styles.” International Review of Pragmatics 71: 309–339. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015b. “Mediating Identity, Ideology and Values in the Public Sphere: Towards a New Model of (Constructed) Social Reality.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 11 (2): 133–156.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika, and Lukasz Grabowski. 2017. “European security under threat: mediating the crisis and constructing the other.” In National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis: Doing and Undoing Europe, edited by Christian Karner and Monika Kopytowska, 83–108. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Landert, Daniela. 2015. “Reportable Facts and a Personal Touch: The Functions of Direct Quotes in Online News.” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, edited by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 29–52. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
North Atlantic Treaty. 1949. Accessible at [URL]
Piazza, Roberta. 2002. “The pragmatics of conducive questions in academic disourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (5): 509–227. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reyes, Antonio. 2011. Voice in Political Discourse. Castro, Chávez, Bush and their Strategic Use of Language. London/New York: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rock, Stephen R. 2000. Appeasement in International Politics. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sakwa, Richard. 2015. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. London: I.B. Tauris. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin. 2010. “To Quote or not to Quote: Setting the Context for Computer-Mediated Dialogues.” Language@Internet 71 (article 5).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stenwall, Maija. 2008. “On emotions and the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity -Tool for analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (9):1569–1586. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat. 1987. “Interactive Frames and Knowledge Scheams in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview.” Social Psychology Quarterly 50 (2):206–216. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tesař, Jan. 2014. Mnichovský komplex. Jeho příčiny a důsledky. Praha: Prostor.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tulmets, Elsa. 2018. “The West, the East and the Rest”. The Foreign Politicy orientations of Central Eastern European Countries.” In The Routledge Handbook of East European Politics, edited by Adam Fagan and Petr Kopecký, 295–306. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ullmann, Stefanie. 2019. “Epistemic Stancetaking and Speaker Objectificaton in a Spatio-Cognitive Discourse World.” Journal of Language and Politics Available at [URL]
Webber, Mark. 2017. “NATO Enlargement an the Post-Communist.” In The Routledge Handbook of East European Politics, edited by Adam Fagan and Petr Kopecký, 346–357. London/New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wieczorek, Anna Ewa. 2008. “Proximisation, Common Ground and Assertion-Based Patterns for Legitimisation in Political Discourse.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 2 (1): 31–48.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Clusivity: A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilson, Andrew. 2014. Ukraine Crisis. What it means for the West. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “Explaining Ukraine.” In The Routledge Handbook of East European Politics, edited by Adam Fagan and Petr Kopecký, 39–52. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zaorálek, Lubomír. 2014. Crisis around Ukraine. In Otázky Václava Moravce [Questions of Václav Moravec], edited by Václav Moravec. Website of Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs: [URL]: Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Gil-Besada, Laura
2025. A literature-based framework for analysing parliamentary diplomacy in conflict settings: European responses to the Russia–Ukraine war. The Journal of Legislative Studies ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Mohamad Jamil, Siti Nurnadilla
2025. Proximizing Fear: Multimodal Racial and Religious Threatoric in Malaysia’s 15th General Election TikTok Videos. In Race, Religion, Royalty in Malaysia [Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, ], ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo
Vladimir O. Bekliamishev
2024. The Functional Role of Historical Analogies in Russian and Ukrainian Presidential Discourses on the Special Military Operation. RUDN Journal of Political Science 26:4 ► pp. 644 ff. DOI logo
Robles, Jessica S. & Bingjuan Xiong
2024. How quotation marks do mockery in online politicized discourse. Journal of Language and Politics DOI logo
Hu, Chajuan
2023. A corpus-based study on the cognitive construction of security in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo
Hu, Chajuan
2024. Modeling the audience’s perception of security in media discourse. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1 DOI logo
Salamurović, Aleksandra
2023. The Metonymy EUrope as a Means of Legitimizing Nations in the Western Balkans. In Konzepte der NATION im europäischen Kontext im 21. Jahrhundert [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo
Ye, Hong & Kexin Chen
2023. A study on the discourse strategy of telecommunication fraud based on proximization theory. Discourse & Communication 17:2 ► pp. 155 ff. DOI logo
Li, Ke & Xiaonan Gong
2022. Proximization: a critical cognitive analysis of health security discourse. Text & Talk 42:5 ► pp. 713 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue