Language and Security: The Language of Securitization in Contemporary Slovak Public Discourse

Monograph focuses on the analysis of securitizing speech acts produced by major actors in Slovak public discourse, primarily left and right populists. In the case studies attention is centered on the nature of produced utterances, especially at the lexical level, with an emphasis on speech tactics and discourse strategies. With these intentions in mind, the researchers investigate how alleged threats are verbalized, which linguistic devices the producers of threat articulations most frequently employ in presenting them, and what persuasive effects can result from their usage. The authors also focused their research on metaphors and used the tools of corpus linguistics in their analysis. This research falls within the fields of political linguistics and linguistic pragmatics. In their analyses, the authors focus on pressing social issues such as migration, the war in Ukraine, public health issues, economic crisis, and other 'pre-election' populist topics.