A Study On The Threat Construction Of Epidemic Discourse In The Washington Post From The Perspective Of Convergence Theor

Since its outbreak,the Covid-19 has attracted high attention from scholars and has become the spotlight for media coverage.In recent years,the combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics has produced the Proximization Theory,which is the latest theoretical achievement of Critical Discourse Analysis.The Proximization Theory has achieved rich research results in the field of political discourse,but the study of epidemic discourse is still in its infancy.Therefore,based on Polish linguist Piotr Cap’s Proximization Theory,this thesis studies the discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic in the Washington Post and conducts research from three dimensions of Spatial Proximization,Temporal Proximization and Axiological Proximization.The purpose is to reveal how the media and medical institutions construct threats to the American public through the epidemic discourse and the underlying ideology.The findings are as follows:(1)Spatial,Temporal and Axiological Proximization are all reflected in the corpus,but it is mainly dominated by Spatial and Temporal Proximization,and supplemented by Axiological Proximization.(2)Through analyzing the corpus,it reveals the unequal power relationship among different power subjects,including medical institutions,the Trump administration and the public.(3)Through the use of three proximization discourse strategies,it reveals the positive ideology of the media and medical institutions in guiding the public to take measures against the epidemic.To a certain extent,this study enriches the understanding of threat construction in the field of health discourse,and also provides reference value for language researchers to explore threat construction in other fields of public discourse.