Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2021

Abstract

Offence is a central concept in impoliteness, aggression and conflict research, yet has received only passing mention in definitions of impoliteness and related concepts. Janicki (2017) argues that impoliteness and language aggression scholars are needlessly worried about definitions. We use Janicki’s (2017) work as a springboard into a discussion of definitions of impolite or taboo language, airing potential problems and suggesting that the study of metalanguage offers at least a partial solution. We report a study of the metalanguage of offence in British English, and briefly examine whether there are any differences in Australian English, using SketchEngine to interrogate data in the two-billion word Oxford English Corpus. In so doing, we tease out different uses of the term offensive, and show that concepts such as offence are coloured by the specific linguistic and cultural contexts in which they appear. We conclude that while corpus-based metalinguistic analyses cannot completely eliminate the problem of definitional infinite regress, they do, however, offer an empirically grounded way of defining words that allows us to move beyond the intuitions of individual researchers.

Abstract

On October 9, 2012 Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl, was severely wounded by a Taliban assassin’s bullet. This was the culmination of a history of conflict in the Swat valley region of north-western Pakistan. The historical, ethnic, political and religious reasons for this conflict are manifold. After several surgeries in Pakistan and Great Britain, Malala Yousafzai miraculously recovered from her serious injuries and was even able to give a speech at the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday on July 12, 2013.

In this paper, Malala Yousafzai’s speech will be analysed in some detail regarding her main arguments and verbal presentation strategies. Furthermore, I will focus on the way Malala Yousafzai deals with both the verbal and non-verbal aggression of the Taliban. I would also like to show how determined she is to argue against the Taliban’s escalation of the conflict without letting herself getting entangled in a spiral of verbal violence.

The theoretical framework for this analysis and the critical evaluation of the speech will be the concept of “strategic maneuvering” as developed by van Eemeren (2010, 2018) within his framework of Pragma-Dialectics. This concept has frequently been applied to the analysis of political discourse (see e.g. Kienpointner 2013, 2017).

Abstract

As parliamentary debates increasingly display rising levels of political conflict, the polarized and aggressive polemical exchanges in Prime Minister’s Questions are impacting the current agenda-setting and consequently public perceptions and assessments. To get a deeper understanding of the discourse strategies and argumentation practices used in the conflict-driven interaction between opposition MPs (particularly the Leader of the Opposition) and the Prime Minister, the present investigation has been carried out at macro- and micro-levels in an interdisciplinary perspective integrating Dascal’s (1998, 2008) typology of polemical exchanges and Ilie’s (2015a, 2018) pragma-rhetorical approach. At the macro-level, the aim is to account for the context-specific functions of three main types of polemical exchanges, i.e. discussions (focused on establishing the truth), disputes (focused on winning the argument) and controversies (focused on persuading the adversary/audience). At the micro-level, the aim is to examine the interplay and the extent to which the three polemical exchanges crisscross, overlap and/or complement each other through the use of three recurring metadiscourse strategies, i.e. definitions, quotations and parentheticals.

Abstract

This paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the label maleducado/ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from five ad hoc corpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital discourse provided by Sketch Engine. The analysis adopts a corpus-based metapragmatic approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that maleducado was the most frequent metapragmatic label under scrutiny in the Twitter corpora and motivated the subsequent study of lay conceptualizations of this term.

Abstract

This paper explores disagreement practice in political discourse, specifically in the under explored public inquiry communicative event and more specifically in the select-committee hearing. We revisit earlier work on theorising disagreement to expand our understanding of its contextual nature, particularly in relation to the making of ideology.

Public inquiries combine the characteristics of professional meetings with characteristics of political discourse. They are typified by hybridised and ambiguous role expectations which participants negotiate in and through (potentially competing) practices in doing the ideological work demanded by the policy process. In this context, disagreement emerges as key to the performance of the interactants’ situated and explicit/semi-permanent roles as professional politicians.

By applying Critical Interactional Sociolinguistic analysis within a wider frame of audience design, we demonstrate the importance of the ideological role of disagreement to the policy process. We argue that further attention needs to be given to the policy talk in meso-level political events, such as the public inquiry, which connect the ideological (macro) political domains of human activity with the (micro) here and now of talk. We close the paper with directions for further research.

This article reviews Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs9780198758655£45.00