A Study Of UN Secretary-general’s Speeches On Climate Change In Light Of Proximization Theory

Environmental discourse comes into being with people’s increasing attention to environmental problems,which aims to reveal the potentially destructive behaviors or concepts hidden in the discourse and calls on people to take actions to protect the environment.The study of environmental discourse is showing a multidisciplinary and multiperspective trend.In the field of linguistics,the current research on environmental discourse can be generally divided into three research approaches:ecolinguistics,cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis.However,there are relatively few studies to explore the threat construal in environmental discourse and reveal how discourse manipulates and persuades the audience based on proximization theory,which combines cognitive and critical analysis.Based on this,this thesis,from the perspective of proximization theory,collects current UN secretary-general’s speeches on climate change as data for analysis.This study mainly explores the following two research questions:(1)What are the central entities and the peripheral entities in the discourse space based on proximization theory in the UN secretary-general’s speeches on climate change?(2)How is the threat construal of peripheral entities realized through proximization strategies in the UN secretary-general’s speeches on climate change?As a cognitive-pragmatic model of crisis and threat construal,the proximization theory combines with cognitive and critical analysis,providing a feasible perspective for people to analyze persuasive,manipulative and coercive discourse.This thesis selects 10 speeches on climate change on the official website of United Nations,with12,585 words in total and the time spanning from 2017 to 2019.The average number of each speech is about 1,258 words.In addition,this study mainly adopts a combination method of quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the above questions.Firstly,qualitative analysis is used to identify the central entities and peripheral entities in the discourse space,then the proportion of each entity is shown by quantitative statistics.Next,the proportion of each proximization strategy in threat construal is identified by means of quantitative statistics.Combining qualitative analysis,this study illustrates how threats are construed through spatial,temporal and axiological proximization with authentic examples from speeches.The findings are as follows:(1)In the environmental discourse about climate change,five main lexical items are conceptualized as central entities: “we”,“the world”,“government”,“all people” and “businesses”,reflecting the extensive range of central entities;there are two main categories of peripheral entities: “adverse climatic phenomena” and “inaction”.(2)Different proximization strategies are applied to realize threat construal of different peripheral entities.When the peripheral entities are “adverse climatic phenomena”,threat construal is realized mainly through three proximization strategies: spatial proximization,temporal proximization as well as axiological proximization.When the peripheral entities belong to the “inaction”category,the threat construal is mainly realized through the axiological proximization,especially relying on the IDCs’ positive values.This study not only provides a new research perspective for environmental discourse and helps readers to have a better understanding of environmental discourse,but also further verifies the strong explanatory power of the proximization theory in environmental discourse.In addition,it can help readers form critical thinking and improve their ability to analyze manipulative and persuasive discourses.