This project, financed by the Swiss National ScientifIc Foundation, was carried out between 2015-2017. The project focuses on the ongoing Ukraine conflict and describes it as a clash of different legitimisation discourses, including the Russian and Ukrainian official view, statements of the East Ukrainian separatist movements and the impact of these discourses on Polish and Czech discourses.

The focus on the Ukrainian crisis also calls for a diversification of both linguistic objects and methods. The specialisation in implicit strategies which characterises the current project will be supplemented by a selective scrutiny of explicit discourse to be conducted by means of proximisation theory in its latest version (Cap 2013). This allows us to combine our fundamentally pragmatic approach with a cognitive linguistic and critical discourse analytical orientation.

Our ultimate goal is to contribute to a new in-depth understanding of the interplay of explicit and implicit political communication in critical situations where war and peace are at stake. On the other hand, since counts of lexical expressions and grammatical constructions in a given sample of texts are an indispensable prerequisite for proximisation theory, the latter offers a valuable theoretical component which enables us to introduce quantitative methods into our research and thus make its findings better founded empirically.