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Abstract Abstracts: In this paper, we intend to make a critical cognitive analysis of political conflict discourses, focusing on discourses of Syrian war as a case study. Based upon corpus study and quantitative-qualitative approach, we discuss the construction of discourse space and shift in “deictic center” of discourses on Syrian war on their spatial, temporal and axiological axes， combining Discourse Space Theory and Proximization Theory. On the basis of synchronic contrastive analysis of discourses of American, Syrian and Chinese media, we find that (1) Both America and Syria apply a large number of spatial proximization strategies with adequate axiological proximization strategies aided to construe a discourse space in which entities outside the deictic center are encroaching upon it, causing threat. (2) On temporal axis, Whitehouse website, Syrian Sana website and Chinese Xinhua website all mainly adopt past-to-present conceptual shift to enhance historicity, imminence and rapidity of influence brought by the war. (3) The shift in “deictic center” entails subversive changes of distributions and interactive relationship of entities inside and outside the “deictic center”. Whitehouse website enhances legitimization of its military action while Syrian Sana website tries to delegitimize the action. It can be seen that in political conflict discourses, speakers anchored in different “deictic center” tend to employ corresponding language manipulation strategies in service of diverging political goals, while implying different stance-taking and viewpoints.
Key words: critical cognitive linguistics; discourse space; proximization; political discourses; Syrian War
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