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

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Alexandria University

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.

Keywords

Cairo Studies in English
Volume 2021, Issue 2
December 2021
Pages 164-188

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