The Conflict in Ukraine as a Battlefield of Competing Legitimisation Discourses: A Linguistic Approach

My presentation aims at elucidating the Russian and Ukrainian official viewpoints on the Ukraine conflict in terms of the so-called proximisation theory, which describes an ongoing political discourse as an attempt to legitimise the own actions by a threat scenario evoking an approaching danger to be prevented or overcome. The investigation is based on data retrieved with the lexicometric concordance program AntConc and encompasses several genres, such as parliamentary and TV debates, presidential speeches, government statements and interviews, press releases, etc. Besides temporal, spatial and axiological markers pertinent to the proximisation hypothesis, it focuses on salient key words, such as (civil / information / economic / hybrid etc.) war, metaphors and historical parallels. The talk highlights some striking differences in the national rankings of selected key words. Moreover, it demonstrates implicit strategies intended to convey information “off the record”.
Daniel Weiss held chairs of Slavic linguistics at the universities of Hamburg, Munich and Zurich. After 32 years he retired in August 2014. He has authored more than 140 publications. His main object languages are Russian and Polish, his main fields of interest syntax, semantics and pragmatics at both sentence and discourse levels. About one third of his work is devoted to the analysis of political discourse in socialist and post-socialist Russia and Poland.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Bernhard Brehmer