Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018

In this paper we intend to show that conflict emerging from multiple and competing perspectives on social reality, may not necessarily be avoided in class, but it could instead become the starting point of critical discussions among teachers and students. To this end, we focus on the exploitation of essays written by immigrant students attending Greek Lyceums (15–18 years old) to promote conflict-dialogue processes in class, which are most compatible with critical literacy. We suggest that language teaching concentrating on texts including immigrant experiences and ambivalent identities constructed by immigrant students, could underline the conflict between majority expectations or pressures and minority efforts to adjust to a complex, often inhospitable context. Such a conflict could enhance immigrant and non-immigrant students’ critical literacy by bringing to the surface and critically discussing assimilationist and monoculturalist ideologies, thus promoting a culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Using four tweets by Steven Salaita about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that resulted in the retraction of his academic job offer in September 2014 as our case study, we investigate the role of Twitter in the shaping and reception of the controversial messages. Our analysis combines Gricean pragmatics with im/politeness and hate-speech research to reveal a complex layering of potential meanings stemming from what is linguistically encoded in each tweet. Their construal as hate speech, in particular, depends on which of these potential meanings critics chose to focus upon. We account for this finding by considering the diversity of potential audiences of a tweet and suggest that the effects of context collapse on implicated meanings can be especially detrimental. Competition for attention among incoming tweets, Twitter’s central affiliative function and applicable length restrictions can, nevertheless, place a premium on communicating such meanings.

This paper explores the Twitter discourse of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, regarding security issues and the threat of ‘Islamist terrorism’ as manifested in the latest election campaign (March 2015) and his tweets and statements on Operation Protective Edge (July – August 2014). By focusing on national security and the underlying threat of terrorism against Israel and the West on Twitter, I argue that Netanyahu disseminates his political agenda further and attempts to communicate political decisions on the Gaza conflict in a digital environment.

By synthesizing Aristotle’s dialectic and rhetoric and the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), and drawing on the concepts of topos and fallacy, I attempt to understand and explain how the Gaza conflict is communicated on social media by the Israeli Prime Minister. My aim is also to shed light on the validity of social media in political discourse and to examine whether and how social media can play a role in the propagation of political discourse in times of crisis through an argumentative discourse analysis of the tweets posted by the Prime Minister of Israel.

This paper examines how the jihadist terrorist groups Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State discursively construct ‘the West’ as an alien, aberrant ‘other’ in their respective online propaganda magazines Inspire and Dabiq over a 5 year period (2010–2015). The analysis integrates insights from the field of Terrorism Studies into a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies approach, working centrally with the notions of othering and conventionalised impoliteness. Our findings reveal not only that othering is a key discursive process in the groups’ online propaganda machinery but that it is discursively realised via homogenisation, suppression (stereotyping) and pejoration strategies. The latter are further examined via the notion of conventional impoliteness. Pointed criticism emerges as the most frequent conventionalised impoliteness strategy in both magazines. Threats, condescension and exclusion strategies are also saliently used, albeit with different relative frequencies within each magazine. The findings show the value of Discourse Analysis to research into (jihadist) terrorism, including the possibility of drawing upon its findings to develop tailored counter-messages to those advanced by (jihadist) terrorist groups.

This paper addresses problems with swearing on the internet. The opening section of the paper defines swearing (uttering offensive emotional speech) as a ubiquitous form of impolite human behavior. Swearing can occur wherever humans communicate with each other and that it appears in computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not surprising. The second section documents how swearwords appear in email, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube and in other practices and sites (trolling, 4chan). Swearword use is situated in the context of emerging research on impoliteness and moral order (politeness norms and standards that govern internet behavior). Online swearword use is a function of moral order, as well as users’ interpersonal characteristics such as age (younger more likely than older users), gender (men more likely than women), the time of day (later in the day and evening), and a website’s social composition (adversarial and male dominated more than homogeneous friendly sites). The paper concludes with suggestions for dealing with internet swearword use where regulation is desirable and feasible. Websites and communities should develop moral order norms that at a minimum restrict illegal forms of speech (e.g., credible threats of violence, workplace sexual harassment).

Two experiments tested whether male and female political speakers in the United States are judged differently when they use verbal attacks. Participants read eight short excerpts of political speeches, half of which contained character and competence attacks (the other half without such attacks), and half of which were attributed to a female speaker (the other half a male speaker), and rated these in terms of agreement with the message, and perceptions of credibility, appropriateness, and aggressiveness. In both experiments, messages containing verbally aggressive attacks resulted in less perceived credibility and appropriateness, and these negative effects were consistent regardless of the speaker’s gender. In Experiment 1, women tended to penalize aggressive speakers more so than did men, suggesting the men are less sensitive to verbal aggression in their evaluations of political speakers. However, women tended to perceive non-aggressive female speakers as more aggressive than male speakers. Most of these interaction effects were not replicated in Experiment 2.

This essay offers insights into the problematic notions of irony, sarcasm and mock politeness, inspired by Charlotte Taylor’s recent monograph Mock Politeness in English and Italian. A Corpus-Assisted Metalanguage Analysis. Different understandings of the concept of mock politeness, as well as sarcasm and irony, are succinctly depicted. Some explanation is also provided for the contradictory findings reported in previous scholarship with regard to the im/politeness effects of irony. Additionally, this paper revisits Taylor’s select conclusions about the use of the first-order labels that she considers pertinent to mock politeness (i.e. labels used by lay language users).