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

This article examines how English- and Uzbek-language militarydiscourse frames war and defense through recurring rhetorical strategies thatlegitimize action, mobilize publics, and perform institutional authority. Building onframing theory and discourse-based legitimation models, the study applies acontrastive discourse-analytic method to an illustrative bilingual corpus of publicfacing military communications (official statements, press releases, commemorativemessages, and security briefings). Strategies were coded across six functionalframes: 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 andcollective identity, alongside systematic differences in how obligation andlegitimacy are linguistically “staged.” English discourse more frequently relies onimpersonal institutional voice, policy rationalization, and modal projection (e.g.,must/will) to produce a technocratic authority effect. Uzbek discourse more oftenforegrounds community-centered obligation and moral-evaluative stance (e.g.,kerak/lozim/shart) to produce a normative authority effect. The findings contributeto comparative military discourse studies by describing how framing choices interactwith language-specific resources to stabilize legitimacy claims in high-stakescommunication.