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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
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The non-translation strategy in translating ISIS radical discourse
Author(s): Samia Bazzipp.: 133–155 (23)More LessAbstractThis paper examines the contribution of translation to the shaping of ISIS concepts and discourses circulated through its media machine, which includes Dabiq Magazine and the Al-Furqan Foundation. It will explore propaganda strategies used by ISIS to disseminate radical thought through professional digitalized media by drawing on a corpus of texts published in such outlets – including political speeches given by ISIS leaders, as well as online reports, all of which are translated by ISIS’ own translators, the mujtahidun (the industrious ones). A comparative analysis of the original and the translated texts reveals a number of translation strategies that ISIS deploys to construct radicalized knowledge, to serve a violent agenda, and to appeal to a large number of potential foreign fighters. It will be argued that non-translation is a particularly important strategy employed to achieve these objectives. It will also be suggested that Islamic concepts such as Khilāfah, Jamā’ah, Ummah, Hijra, Bay’ah, Da’wah, Jihād, tawāghīt, and other motifs saturated with an ancient Islamic register tend to be left untranslated as a way of reinforcing perceptions of Muslim unity, power, allegiance, and brotherhood against the enemy. The analysis further reveals that particular ideological concepts are left untranslated when ISIS propagandists advocate fighting against the “unbelievers”, arguably in an attempt to galvanize the group’s followers – whether by appealing to their religious fanaticism or by promoting the uncritical reproduction of symbolic discourses grounded in Islamic history. These strategies highlight a need for awareness of the importance of language use in the reproduction of radical systems of thought and the use of (non-)translation for recruitment purposes. This socio-political linguistic study draws on Critical Discourse Analysis – incorporating the work of Fairclough (1995), Gramsci (1971) and Bourdieu (1991) to unravel the connections that exist between language use and the power of ISIS as a group, and to illustrate how specific translation techniques are adopted to reinforce the Caliphate’s hegemony.
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Qualifying insults, offensive epithets, slurs and expressive expletives
Author(s): Manuel Padilla Cruzpp.: 156–181 (26)More LessAbstractThe category of insults comprises disparaging qualifying terms, derogatory epithets, racial/ethnic slurs and participle-like expletives. All of them channel speakers’ (negative) psychological states, so they are considered expressives. Despite the enormous interest that they have aroused, research has not duly addressed whether all types of insults communicate in the same manner, share the same nature and make a similar contribution to communication. This paper ventures some answers from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Relying on the showing-saying continuum and on the conceptual-procedural distinction, it argues that some insults merely show speaker’s meaning, others encode some conceptual load enabling them to communicate by saying and others communicate by an admixture of both. It also contends that some insults encode conceptual content and processing instructions, but others encode instructions alone. Their output, however, is complex, as it may trigger lexical-pragmatic processes adjusting the encoded conceptual load or psychological-state representations.
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Online moral struggles in hosting immigrant’s discourses
Author(s): Francesca D’Errico and Marinella Paciellopp.: 182–209 (28)More LessAbstractThe present study aims to help better understand the cognitive and affective processes at work in ‘moral struggles’ concerning discussions about hosting immigrants. In particular, it will focus on the prosocial aspect of the debate on hosting of immigrants since previous studies have stressed mainly its racist nature. To this end, a total of 12,583 comments were extracted from the Facebook page of an Italian singer, divided into prosocial and proself stances, and analysed by developing a specific coding based on the theory of helping behaviour in emergency (Darley and Latané 1968) and the theory of moral agency (Bandura 1991). Prosocial processes were defined on the basis of the following ‘loci’: recipients, behaviour, consequences and agency. In parallel the comments were analysed by emotional coding to identify the levels of expressed anger. The results showed a wide variety of prosocial stances associated with these loci in online arguments within real sentences. Prosocial commenters can use words as weapons toward proself commenters to win their ‘crusade’ when they are flamed, and they are ‘cold’ when they focus on recipient and consequences. Finally, results suggested that a dialogue between prosocial and proself positions can occur in the presence of a moderate level of anger.
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“Yes, he is, at least, entertaining”
Author(s): Miriam Malthuspp.: 210–239 (30)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates facework and identity construction on a pro-community water fluoridation Facebook page, drawing on rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2000) and Culpeper’s (1996, 2010, 2011) taxonomy of impoliteness in English. In contrast to previous work on conflictual political talk on social media, which focuses largely on right/left or socially conservative/progressive polarised topics, it addresses discourse on a topic where conflict is between factions aligned with or against the scientific establishment. The paper shows members of an activist group engaging in face-aggravating behaviour against an ideologically opposed commenter. Even when they profess to be educating the commenter, the core goals of their behaviour are enhancing their own quality and identity face within the group by antagonising the outsider; participants construct an expert identity through performing superior intelligence and education, expressed through displays of scientific knowledge and creative forms of linguistic impoliteness.
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Online hatred of women in the Incels.me forum
Author(s): Sylvia Jaki, Tom De Smedt, Maja Gwóźdź, Rudresh Panchal, Alexander Rossa and Guy De Pauwpp.: 240–268 (29)More LessAbstractThis paper presents a study of the (now suspended) online discussion forum Incels.me and its users, involuntary celibates or incels, a virtual community of isolated men without a sexual life, who see women as the cause of their problems and often use the forum for misogynistic hate speech and other forms of incitement. Involuntary celibates have attracted media attention and concern, after a killing spree in April 2018 in Toronto, Canada. The aim of this study is to shed light on the group dynamics of the incel community, by applying mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze how the users of the forum create in-group identity and how they construct major out-groups, particularly women. We investigate the vernacular used by incels, apply automatic profiling techniques to determine who they are, discuss the hate speech posted in the forum, and propose a Deep Learning system that is able to detect instances of misogyny, homophobia, and racism, with approximately 95% accuracy.
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Attending to a possible complaint
Author(s): Eleni Karafotipp.: 269–292 (24)More LessAbstractTaking into account that people are reluctant to engage in a conflictual interaction but also that the recognition and interpretation of a complaint is very much contingent on the discourse in which it appears, the present paper adopts a conversation analytic perspective and studies complaints in ordinary conversation. In terms of politeness research, complaints are characterized as ‘face threatening acts’, with the analysis focusing either on the mitigation strategies the complainer may employ or on the description of the acts that are at the complainee’s disposal. From a wider perspective, the most prominent feature of complaints is that they transform an individual’s trouble into an acknowledgeable interpersonal problem. The present research focuses on complaints addressed to participants in the on-going interaction (direct complaints), explicating instances where members themselves reveal their understanding of the complaint. Special attention is given to the mitigation and accounting practices a complainee employs, i.e. noticings, anticipatory apologies and (preemptive) accounts, which all aim to withhold the disaffiliative complaint. Through these practices, not only does the candidate complaint-recipient mitigate the impact of his/her accountability but also third party participants attempt to avoid the delivery of the complaint. The data of the study consist of 20 audio-recorded conversations between friends and relatives and are drawn from the Corpus of Spoken Greek of the Institute of Modern Greek Studies.
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Alternative truths and delegitimization pragmatic strategies around the 2018 Italian elections
Author(s): Benedetta Baldi, Ludovico Franco and Leonardo M. Savoiapp.: 293–320 (28)More LessAbstractIn this paper we aim at analysing, from a pragmatic viewpoint, the rhetoric of delegitimization of the opponent in new media insofar as it triggers individual, uncontrolled and deep-rooted forms of communications. The communicative context is that of the political controversies and the propaganda around the Italian elections of March 2018. Accusations of fake news, hate speech and other delegitimizing rhetorical tools occur within the messages distributed on social media by politicians. We are specifically interested in illustrating and examining the disposition/standpoint of public social actors, of politicians in particular, toward the (delegitimizing) effects of the spreading of foul language, hate speech and fake news as instruments for re-shaping reality and introducing an alternative reading of facts.
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The hate that dare not speak its name?
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