FRAMING WAR AND DEFENSE: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MILITARY RHETORICAL STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article examines how English- and Uzbek-language military
discourse frames war and defense through recurring rhetorical strategies that
legitimize action, mobilize publics, and perform institutional authority. Building on
framing theory and discourse-based legitimation models, the study applies a
contrastive discourse-analytic method to an illustrative bilingual corpus of publicfacing military communications (official statements, press releases, commemorative
messages, and security briefings). Strategies were coded across six functional
frames: threat amplification, protection/guardianship, unity and collective identity,
legality/authorization, sacrifice and heroism, and modernization/competence.
Results show cross-linguistic convergence around threat–protection pairings and
collective identity, alongside systematic differences in how obligation and
legitimacy are linguistically “staged.” English discourse more frequently relies on
impersonal institutional voice, policy rationalization, and modal projection (e.g.,
must/will) to produce a technocratic authority effect. Uzbek discourse more often
foregrounds community-centered obligation and moral-evaluative stance (e.g.,
kerak/lozim/shart) to produce a normative authority effect. The findings contribute
to comparative military discourse studies by describing how framing choices interact
with language-specific resources to stabilize legitimacy claims in high-stakes
communication.