The Discursive Construction Of Legitimization In The World Economic Outlook Based On Proximization

Evolving from critical discourse analysis,proximization theory and its goal——legitimization have received much attention from scholars at home and abroad,and studies of proximization have been extended to many domains,such as public health,modern technology,environment,etc.However,few researches have made business discourse analysis from the perspective of proximization.Therefore,this thesis analyzes the proximization strategies of business discourse and construction of legitimization from the spatial,temporal and axiological dimensions.This thesis selected four reports of the World Economic Outlook published by the International Monetary Fund from April 2020 to October 2021 to analyze the proximization strategies in them and how these strategies legalized the anti-pandemic discourses of the Fund.The research results show that the three proximization strategies are all involved in corpus collected.Spatial proximization shows the highest proportion and temporal and axiological proximizations are similar in their frequencies.More specifically,spatial proximization highlights the peripheral entities(the virus and its related elements,such as inflation and housing prices),invading the home entities(people and countries around the world).Temporal proximization stresses the contrast between the severe consequences caused by the peripheral entities and the active postures of the home entities.Axiological proximization emphasizes the negative values of the peripheral entities opposed to the positive values of the home entities,which may lead to a physical clash.This thesis plays an important role in proving the strong explanatory power of proximization theory and shedding light on how speakers use language to influence their audience’s minds to realize legitimization.