- Home
- e-Journals
- Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
- Previous Issues
- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2023
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2023
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2023
-
“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate”
Author(s): Mohammad Makki and Andrew S. Rosspp.: 1–24 (24)More LessAbstractThe diplomatic relationship between the USA and Iran has long been fraught and is characterised by various conflicts and the implementation of economic sanctions. It can be argued that the relationship became even more hostile after Donald Trump was elected president of the US. Trump’s sentiments towards Iran were made public through his behavior on Twitter, both before and after he took over the Presidency. These sentiments have been a mix of negative and sometimes positive views and opinions. This study uses a corpus of Trump’s tweets that explicitly mention ‘Iran’ as the basis of a linguistic analysis and applies to it the analytical framework of appraisal from Systemic Functional Linguistics. More specifically, this study focuses on how he established an Us vs. Them dichotomy. While the analysis shows that Iran has been generally portrayed negatively by Trump, there were several tweets where the Iranian government was appraised positively, too. More interestingly, in those tweets, he seemed to target Obama and democrats and represent them negatively while Iran was assessed in positive terms.
-
Verbal horror and slaughterhouse imagery in media representation of herdsmen violence
Author(s): Ebuka Elias Igwebuikepp.: 25–47 (23)More LessAbstractNigerian media reports on herdsmen’s violence present dehumanised images of a slaughterhouse in which farmers are represented as animals being slaughtered by herders. Using a critical discourse analysis and appraisal framework, with a focus on the systems of attitude and graduation, this paper critically examines media representation of herdsmen’s violence as “butchering” in the form of carnism. Analysis reveals that carnist representation is reinforced through death-dealing socio-cognitive labelling, attitudinal lexicalisation and strands of carnism. Also, using attitude and graduation resources, a one-directional and horrific image is painted. The study concludes that the creation as well as consumption of such scary news cultivates cognitive prejudices and stereotypes.
-
Love thy ‘populist’
Author(s): Barbora Čapinskápp.: 48–76 (29)More LessAbstractThis article aims to deepen our understanding of scandals involving both transgression of accepted speech and populist logic by analysing the origins, development, and outcome of a 2018 Czech media controversy. The scandal erupted when a public service radio station was accused of airing pornographic content. It escalated when the accuser added a xenophobic, homophobic and nativist commentary to his complaint. By analysing each party’s arguments, the contested and silenced ideas, and the fantasmatic dimension, I demonstrate how each actor contributed to the escalation of the conflict and facilitated a shift in accepted public conduct. I propose to view such scandals as attempts to break hegemonic silence that reveal the lack of acceptance of a new norm, in this case homosexuality. I conclude that such scandals can support dialogue and reduce the polarization of society if dissenting views are taken into consideration and divisive language avoided by all sides.
-
Metaphors, powerlessness and online aggression
Author(s): Janet Hopp.: 77–100 (24)More LessAbstractA lockdown was imposed in Wuhan, China, the alleged epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak, on 23 January 2020. Rattled by the short notice and severity of the restrictions, many grabbed the last opportunity to escape, an act widely criticised on Weibo, China’s popular microblogging site. This study aims to examine the unsavoury discourse deployed by Weibo users to express impoliteness and discursively construct negative identities of the lockdown escapees. Posts on Weibo criticising, reporting and threatening the escapees were analysed, revealing that the escapees were dehumanised through vivid animal metaphors to highlight their irresponsibility and call for their punishment. Animal metaphors can co-occur with various impoliteness triggers to intensify offensiveness, heightening the hostility of interlocutors towards a target.
This use of metaphors also showcases online users’ anger, distrust, and hatred towards the escapees, their solidarity-seeking behaviour online and their irrationality.
-
Slang and verbal aggression
Author(s): Elisa Mattiellopp.: 101–120 (20)More LessAbstractWhile lexical and discourse strategies of hate speech have widely been studied hitherto, there is limited research devoted to the contribution of grammatical and morphological aspects to verbal aggression. This paper provides a corpus-assisted analysis of slang morphological means used in verbal aggression. The focus is on four compound families (X-ass, X-brain, X-face, X-head), which are often used in slang to form compound words referring to specific groups, such as homosexuals, fools, or ineffectual people. The paper adopts a morphopragmatic approach to investigate three pragmatic meanings/functions – namely, derisive, critical, and offensive – of slang words in situations of conflict. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of data drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows the frequency of the morphological processes, their privileged genres and contexts, as well as their negative potential and face-threatening power.
-
Dualisms in Jihad
Author(s): Katie J. Pattersonpp.: 121–143 (23)More LessAbstractThis paper explores how metaphors are employed in jihadist magazines to promote a dichotomist worldview of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, ‘good’ versus ‘bad’, ‘east’ versus ‘west’ and ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’. It argues that juxtapositions in both language and thought help writers to reaffirm and/or challenge certain paradigms. The approach uses critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) to investigate qualitative evidence of conceptual metaphors, focusing on the domains life is a seed, conflict is a relationship between predator and prey, and faith is light/lack of faith is darkness. Dichotomous language in these domains (e.g., ‘seed’ versus ‘weed’; ‘sheep’ versus ‘wolves’; the ‘spark of Jihad’ versus the ‘shadow’ of Western governments) helps to position extremist groups on the right side of a number of paradigms. The use of binary metaphors also permits simultaneously conflicting conceptualisations; for instance, jihadists are both innocent victims and merciless defenders of their faith, depending on with whom or what they are juxtaposed. The research concludes that the use of binary metaphors serves to underscore entrenched paradigms of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’, thus allowing the writers to frame their discourse in a way that justifies and promotes their extremist agenda.
Most Read This Month

-
-
The hate that dare not speak its name?
Author(s): Robbie Love and Paul Baker
-
- More Less