A Study Of Anti-immigration Discourse On Multimodal Proximization

The proximization theory was proposed by Piotr Cap in 2013.It was originally used to analyze political discourse and then applied to public discourse analysis.The discourse analysis of the proximization theory is mainly based on its “Spatial-Temporal-Axiological model”.As a new approach of critical discourse analysis,the proximization model,like traditional critical discourse analysis,is confined to the language itself,ignoring other forms of meaning expressions,such as images,gestures,and sounds.However,public discourse is mostly not monomodal.Based on this,the thesis proposes a new model named multimodal proximization model,which incorporates the visual grammar theory into the frameworks of the STA model in proximization theory.In the last month of the Brexit referendum,the anti-immigration reports from the anti-EU tabloids who blamed the European Union's loose laws for uncontrolled immigration to Britain increased significantly.This thesis selects 30 anti-immigration reports with the “UK immigration” as the keyword from the three representative anti-EU newspapers,The Sun,Daily Mail and Daily Express,to establish a self-compiled corpus.These 30 reports total 27,872 words and 35 pictures.Based on the multimodal proximization model,after quantitative and qualitative analysis of the text and images in the 30 reports,the study has the following findings:Firstly,the proximization strategy includes at least two modes,the verbal mode,and the visual mode.Secondly,the main discourse purpose of the proximization strategy is coercion.With the help of the visual mode,the proximization strategy can better achieve its discourse purpose.Thirdly,the multimodal proximization strategy is particularly prominent in the anti-immigration reports during this period.Threat construction and fear generation are core features of the British anti-immigration discourse.Fourthly,the anti-immigration discourse in this period mainly focuses on the spatial multimodal proximization strategy.Fifthly,in the anti-immigration reports of this period,the news media mainly highlighted the threats brought by EU immigrants to the British and British people from the following aspects: national security(including border security),national sovereignty,public security,and pressures on employment,housing,and medical care brought about by population pressure.This thesis proposes multimodal proximization,and its application to anti-immigration discourse analysis also confirms its explanatory power,which helps to promote the development of the proximization theory.Besides,domestic research on this theory is relatively less,and this study has certain reference value for domestic research on the proximization theory.