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