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217146

Fear Generation and Policy Legitimization Through Proximization of Threat in COVID-19 Discourse

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Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

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Abstract

This paper aims to investigate legitimization and the pattern of fear generation in the discourse on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in the opening remarks at the media briefings on COVID-19 given by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The selected remarks which are published at the official UN website cover a time span of ten months, starting January 2020 until October 2020. The study draws on the relatively new theory in discourse studies, Proximization Theory (PT), which was developed for the analysis of public legitimization discourse. This theory, which proposes the spatial, temporal and axiological (henceforth STA) model for analysis, claims that policies set by authorities are legitimized by the forced construal of an external enemy that is spatially, temporally, and ideologically threatening the speaker and their home territory which is also the speaker's addressees'. This claim has shown to be true in the analysis of the selected discourse on COVID-19, which, by the means of lexico-grammatical strategies, features the unknown pathogen as a devastating threat that is encroaching upon people and the whole world; consequently, harsh preventive measures must be urgently and legitimately taken to combat the envisaged threat.

DOI

10.21608/cse.2022.59476.1088

Keywords

proximization, COVID-19, threat-based discourse, legitimization, STA model

Authors

First Name

Safaa

Last Name

Alshanawani

MiddleName

Mustafa

Affiliation

Alexandria University

Email

safaa.alshanawani@hotmail.com

City

Alexandria

Orcid

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Volume

2021

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

30225

Issue Date

2021-12-01

Receive Date

2021-01-28

Publish Date

2021-12-01

Page Start

164

Page End

188

Print ISSN

0575-1624

Online ISSN

2682-2504

Article File

CSE_Volume 2021_Issue 2_Pages 164-188.pdf

PDF . 316.4kB

Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/article_217146.html

Detail API

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=217146

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Original Article

Type Code

738

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Cairo Studies in English

Publication Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Fear Generation and Policy Legitimization Through Proximization of Threat in COVID-19 Discourse

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Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023