Threat-building construal and legitimization strategies in governor Soludo’s speech on the menace of unknown gunmen in Anambra State

This paper demonstrates how political leaders justify proposed security policies and enact social approval through fear appeal strategies of proximization. In lieu of that, the paper aims to achieve the specific objectives of identifying the pragma-linguistic resources deployed in the construction of fear appeal and enactment of social. The study leveraged on the theoretical affordances of Caps (2006) proximization and aspects of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor representation strategies in carrying out a qualitative descriptive content method of discourse patterns and lexico-grammatical resources that actualize threat construal and legitimization in the governor’s speech of 25th May, 2022. Consequently, the paper uncovers the maximization of threat construal and(de)legitimization ODC entities through lexico-grammatical patterns that underscore the extension of the range IDC impacted by ODC threat, human tolls of ODC threat, use of cancer metaphor to indicate speed of the spread of ODC impact in the face of inertness of IDC, the strengthening of the negative-them- Positive-Us, spatial and ideological divides, indeterminacy of ODC’s past, present while legitimizations of proposed policy were discursively realized through implicit source tagging, relational identification, collectivization, spatialization, assimilation and metaphor of job. The paper concludes that proximization strategies are effective tools in the hands of political leaders to legitimize policies.