Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Online First

The emergence of digital platforms has allowed feminists to employ new methods to fight gender inequality and break the silence which surrounds gender-based aggression. This paper aims to examine evaluative discourses employed by Twitter users to construct and denounce sexual violence in a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. This hashtag was created in 2018 as a response to Donald Trump’s tweets in which he questioned Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s decision not to report her case of sexual assault when it occurred. As a result, victim-survivors adopted the hashtag to explain why they did not report their own cases. The present study adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach and draws on Appraisal Theory to examine ideological discourses of (sexually) violent acts and victim-survivors. Results show the presence of discourses of violence and emotional suffering employed to bond around shared experiences and publicly denounce oppressive patriarchal practices and a lack of support from institutions and authorities.

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.

The 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia represented a watershed moment for the alt-right movement in the United States, involving a highly visible demonstration of multiple far-right hate groups. Understanding how multiple groups such as those that “united” in the Unite the Right Rally is essential in potentially disrupting future events and curbing their ability to create consensus. In this paper, we note that participants often engage in conflict through evaluative and authoritative stance taking. Aggression is sometimes ignored, and other times gets escalated through interpersonal conflict. Throughout, rapport or consensus is rarely prioritized. These findings offer insight into the workings of the alt-right and provide an example of how discourse analysis can be used in intelligence gathering and research on these dangerous groups.

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 ).