book announcement

[Piotr Cap]

Dear Colleagues,

Pasted below is a promotional flyer of my new book
"Legitimization in Political Discourse: A
Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War
Rhetoric". I would be most grateful if you could
recommend this title to your libraries, colleagues and
students, esp. those involved in CDA or CDA-related
research.

Many thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Piotr Cap
_________________________________________________
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS
ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
_________________________________________________
Legitimisation in Political Discourse: A Cross-
Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War
Rhetoric, by Piotr Cap.
1-84718-080-9, 220 x 150 (mm), 150pp, Hardback, UK:
Ł29.99, US: $59.99
_________________________________________________
How did the G.W. Bush administration manage to
persuade Americans to go to war in Iraq in March 2003?
How was this intervention, and the global campaign
named as “war-on-terror,” legitimised linguistically?
This book shows that the best legitimisation effects
in political discourse are accomplished through the
use of ‘proximization’–a cognitive-rhetorical strategy
that draws on the speaker’s ability to present events
as directly and increasingly affecting the addressee,
usually in a negative or threatening way. There are
three aspects of proximization: spatial, temporal and
axiological. The spatial aspect involves the construal
of events in the discourse as physically endangering
the addressee. The temporal aspect involves
presenting the events as increasingly momentous and
historic and hence of central significance to both the
addressee and the speaker. The axiological aspect
consists in a growing clash between the system of
values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee,
and the values characterizing a third party whose
actions, ideologically negative, are made “proximate”
and thus threatening. Although the tripartite model of
proximization proposed in the book is very complex at
the level of its linguistic realisation, the working
assumption is intriguingly basic: addressees of
political discourse are more likely to legitimise
preemptive actions aimed at neutralizing the proximate
“threat” if they construe the threat as personally
consequential. The book shows how language of the
war-on-terror, and especially the rhetoric of the Iraq
war, respond to this precondition.
____________________________________________________
"Piotr Cap's book takes great theoretical strides in
critical discourse analysis, exploring the dimensions
of space, time and value, and applying his model to
decisive texts in the contemporary world."

Paul Chilton, Lancaster University
____________________________________________________
Piotr Cap is Associate Professor and Head of the
Department of Pragmatics at the Institute of English,
University of Lodz, Poland. He has published numerous
books and papers in the field of linguistic
pragmatics, political linguistics and language of the
media. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of
California, Berkeley and Boston University, he has
been invited to lecture at many American and European
universities.
___________________________________________________
Order from your library supplier, usual bookstore, or
direct from www.CambridgeScholarsPress.com
Alternatively, write to CSP, 15 Angerton Gdns,
Newcastle upon Tyne NE5 2JA, UK.
___________________________________________________



 


Prof. Dr hab. Piotr Cap
Department of Pragmatics
Institute of English, University of Lodz
Al. Kosciuszki 65
90-514 Lodz, POLAND
tel/fax +48 42 6655220
http://www.geocities.com/strus_pl/piotr_cap


 
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