- Home
- e-Journals
- Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
- Previous Issues
- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
-
‘Like a donkey carrying books’
Author(s): Muhammad A. Badarnehpp.: 1–28 (28)More LessAbstractThis study aims to show how intertextuality is exploited as an impoliteness resource in online reader comments on the website of a London-based pan-Arab Arabic-language daily newspaper. Analysis of 140 reader responses containing impolite references shows that readers called upon and appropriated the language and imagery of impolite and culturally salient prior texts from four sources to perform impoliteness: traditional scriptures, historical texts, poetic texts, and popular proverbs. The use and reception of these impolite intertextualities rely on familiarity with the intertextual source in question. The creative recycling of privileged authoritative texts, use of metaphorical language, invoking of gender identity, and reproducing of particular ideologies played a pivotal role in performing this intertextual impoliteness. The perception of such intertextual impoliteness is crucially influenced by culture as a “general text” (Kristeva 1980) that adds to the complexity of impoliteness when analyzed within a culture-specific context.
-
#shutdownjnu vs #standwithjnu
Author(s): Ritesh Kumarpp.: 29–56 (28)More LessAbstractIn February 2016, one of the premier Universities of higher education in India, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), suddenly came into the limelight for allegedly raising anti-India slogans at one of the protest cultural programmes in the campus. In this paper, I present a study of the co-emergence and spread of the two opposing hashtags in the context of the controversy – #shutdownjnu and #standwithjnu. The study is based on data collected from Twitter over a period of 2 years from February 2016 – February 2018. I present a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of the emergence and use of these two hashtags on Twitter and understand these in terms of the process of enregisterment and how conflict (and consequently aggression) became normative and conventionalised in the context of these hashtags. I also take a comparative look at the enregisterment of the two hashtags and argue that despite similar conditions, enregisterment is not guaranteed.
-
Arcana imperii*
Author(s): Marta Dynel and Fabio I. M. Poppipp.: 57–87 (31)More LessAbstractThis paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication.
-
Managing conflict originated by feminism
Author(s): Lucía Fernández-Amayapp.: 88–117 (30)More LessAbstractThe aim of this study is to analyze how conflict begins, unfolds and ends in a WhatsApp interaction within a Spanish family on 2018’s International Women’s Day. The analytical framework proposed by Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014) is applied to a conversation that began at 10:37 am on March 8 and ended at 1:47 am on March 9. Multimodal analysis is used to consider not only participants’ linguistic strategies for expressing their opinions about feminism, but also the function of multimedia elements and emojis. The results show that conflict is constructed across multiple turns when some participants’ pro-feminist views are seen negatively by others. Thus, feminism emerges as a source of conflict among the family members. Another important issue drawn from the findings is the key role played by multimodal elements which have different functions related to how conflict is created and unfolds, such as being the origin of conflict itself, showing disapproval with others’ opinions, intensifying opinions to show emotion or trying to reduce face-threat.
-
Angry tweets
Author(s): Ruth Breezepp.: 118–145 (28)More LessAbstractThe rise of populism has turned researchers’ attention to the importance of affect in politics. This is a corpus-assisted study investigating lexis in the semantic domain of anger and violence in tweets by radical-right campaigner Nigel Farage in comparison with four other prominent British politicians. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discourse show that Farage cultivates a particular set of affective-discursive practices, which bring anger into the public sphere and offer a channel to redirect frustrations. Rather than expressing his own emotions, he presents anger as generalised throughout society, and then performs the role of defending ‘ordinary people’ who are the victims of the elites. This enables him to legitimise violent emotions and actions by appealing to the need for self-assertion and self-defence.
Most Read This Month

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