Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Military Reports From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

In recent years,Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)has become one of the most vigorous developing research methods.CDA scholars continue to introduce the latest development of psychology,sociology and other branches of science into such a field.Especially,some researches such as Chilton,Hart introduce cognitive perspective into CDA and try to promote a mature theory to explain the cognitive process of discourse generation.The proximization theory,which is proposed by Piotr Cap to make up the deficiency of cognitive processing interpretation,focuses on the symbolic construal of peripheral entities of discourse space,referred as ODCs,as a threat upon central entities referred as IDCs.The threat has a spatial,temporal and axiological character,which allows the division of proximization into three aspects.These three proximization strategies can illustrate how the speaker manipulates the language,increases his credibility and finally legitimizes his goals.Military reports not only deal with defense strategies,but also play an important role in making a public appeal for sociopolitical policies.At the same time,previous researches show analysts who advocate exploring American military discourse from the perspective of proximization theory still account for a small proportion,and more importantly,the research texts lack variety.In order to dig out the language manipulating strategies behind the American military reports,this thesis conducts a research on six military reports including Ballistic Missile Defense Review,Nuclear Posture Review,The Quadrennial Defense Review,Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat,National Defense Strategy Summary,Missile Defense Review from the perspective of proximization theory proposed by Cap.The research questions are as follows:1)How does the proximization theory work in military reports?2)Which proximization strategies will be preferred by the speaker?3)What kinds of national image does the speaker construe with the help of the proximization strategies?Based on a small self-corpus,the study combines quantitative and qualitative methods.Firstly,we are going to select some relative lexical-grammatical items which serve to speaker's legitimized goals and count their frequency respectively.Then,we will explain what these data mean and specify some examples.Finally,we will depict a STA model to represent clearly the proximization construal.The research concludes the following results:1)Spatial proximization strategy is a forced construal of ODCs physically encroaching upon IDCs,causing a destructive impact upon central entities.In reports,IDCs include America,American people and its allies such as Europe.U.S.military force attempts to include as many nations and people as possible in order to fight against destructive impacts and physical threats brought by ODCs which include terrorists,Iran,Russia,China,North Korea and many adversaries with negative values.Military force depicts these impacts as imminent and inevitable unless there are measures from IDC camp.Such a language manipulation fuels people fears of danger.Temporal proximization highlights the momentousness of “now”,the speaker's present moment,through different ways.Some items construe the future-to-present shift and past-to-present shift such as category 1 and category 3 in temporal proximization framework,some making a sharp contrast between a privileged future and an undesired one such as category 5.It is worth mentioning that category 2(involving contrastive use of the simple past and the present perfect construing threatening future extending infinitely from a past instant)in temporal proximization framework is lesser than 0.1%,which means that such ingredients can't well perform the general function of this given strategy.At the same time,we find a new sentence pattern(i.e.ODC camp has done something against the IDC camp and continues to do something)whose count is 0.11%.Therefore,we try to add a new category(i.e.Discourse forms involving the present perfect and simple present construing the long-term impact by ODCs)to the temporal proximization according to the statistics from the corpus.Axiological proximization stresses the construal of IDC-ODC ideology,which may lead to a physical clash.The description of IDCs as the embodiment of democracy,peace and freedom stands in marked contrast to that of ODCs as the carriers of terrorism and regime.Besides,reports use lots of lexical-grammatical items to materialize the ODC antagonistic values into a concrete and physical threat.2)Spatial,temporal and axiological strategies make contributions to legitimization.But the degree of each contribution may be different,and the S-T-A chronology is not unchangeable.According to the final counts,military force prefers spatial and axiological proximization strategies.As such,the overall layout and analytic chronology assume S-A-T mode.3)The addresser construes two complete opposing images to keep legitimization.In report,U.S.military force constructs itself and its allies as peace-loving,democratic,defensive through spatial,temporal and axiological proximization strategies while ODC camp as invasive and violent.This research not only is beneficial to reveal the American ideology,rhetoric manipulation and relative military operations for better knowing each other,but also adds a new perspective into military reports research.