Abstract
This paper is related to a research project entitled “The Ukraine conflict as a battle field of competing legitimisation discourses” that covers Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Czech government statements, parliamentary debates, TV discussions and selected newspapers and elucidates this conflict from a corpus linguistic and cognitive semantic point of view. The overarching framework is provided by Proximisation theory, initiated by P. Chilton (2004) and developed by P. Cap (2013), which is intended, according to P. Chilton (2004), to bring about the “representational ‘proximising’ of the subjectively remote”. This aims at the discursive construal of a direct or indirect political threat which serves to legitimise the speaker’s preventive or reactive actions. Proximisation theory feeds the search for key words by means of the lexicostatistical concordance program AntConc. The latter also allows for their contextual analysis and establishing their national and transnational rankings. Moreover, our approach proposes to complement Proximisation theory by a category called “analogical reasoning” which encompasses comparisons, metaphors / metonymies and quotations based on analogies to the current topic.