a new book in pragmatics and discourse analysis

[Piotr Cap]

(with apologies for cross-posting)


Dear Colleagues and Friends,

FYI, a new book in (cognitive) pragmatics and (political) discourse analysis:

Cap, Piotr. 2013. Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [P&BNS 232]

The book blurb and an endorsement are pasted below.

Best regards,

Piotr

 
Prof. zw. dr hab. Piotr Cap
Department of Pragmatics (Head)
Institute of English, University of Lodz
Al.Kosciuszki 65,
 90-514 Lodz, POLAND
tel/fax +48 42 6655220
http://ia.uni.lodz.pl/pragmatics/faculty/pcap
http://ia.uni.lodz.pl/anglistyka/ZPJ?piotr_cap
http://unilodz.academia.edu/PiotrCap


________________________________
This
book proposes a
new theory (“proximization theory”) in the area of political/public
legitimization discourse. Located at the intersection of Pragmatics, Cognitive
Linguistics and critical approaches, the theory holds that legitimization of
broadly consequential political/public policies, such as pre-emptive
interventionist campaigns, is best accomplished by forced construals of virtual
external threats encroaching upon the speaker and her audience’s home
territory. The construals, which proceed along spatial, temporal and
axiological lines, are forced by strategic deployment of lexico-grammatical
choices drawn from the three domains. This proposal is illustrated primarily in
the in-depth analysis of the 2001-2010 US discourse of the War-on-Terror, and secondarily
in a number of pilot studies pointing to a wide range of further applications
(environmental discourse, health communication, cyber-threat discourse,
political party-representation). The theory and the empirical focus of the book
will appeal to researchers working on interdisciplinary projects in Pragmatics,
Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, as well as
Journalism and Media Studies.
======================


"Piotr Cap’s book is a remarkable synthesis
of strands of thought that have been emerging in linguistics and discourse
analysis over the past decade or so. In the basic elements of our thought and
language we are spatial creatures. Cap draws on work in Cognitive Linguistics
that has shown the fundamental importance of spatial awareness and takes us
into a territory that is of immediate concern in the globalised era where
borders and distance dissolve and are re-imagined. His achievement is to
develop a theoretical framework that reveals the many ways in which the
imagining of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political
sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. This is a book that spans
and combines the cognitive with the pragmatic, the theoretical and the
practical. His theory demonstrates how the principle of metaphor transports our
spatial experience of the near and the far into the mental dimensions of time,
history, values and ideologies. Not only does it present proximization theory
in more detail and with clarity than ever, it demonstrates how the theory can
be applied to one of the dominant discourses of our age, that of anti-terrorism
and anti-migration.  In its final chapter
the book points the way to further explorations in the space of public
discourse, in particular those discourses dealing with the urgent issues of the
environment, technology and health. 
We have here a dynamic model and
methodology to expand our critical understanding of the ever changing space we
build for ourselves and in which we live."
 
Paul ChiltonLancaster
University
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