Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Online First

This study examines how the construction of the Other evolves in Donald Trump’s right-wing populist discourse across his three U.S. presidential campaigns. Using a corpus-assisted Discourse-Historical Approach, it traces shifting targets of exclusion in campaign speeches and the discursive strategies through which they are constructed. Findings reveal three trajectories of othering: opposition to establishment elites in 2016 evolves into an anti-left stance in 2020 and an anti-institutional position in 2024; moral panic is sustained through shifting scapegoating targets framed as sources of social, moral, or epistemic disorder across campaigns; and antagonism shifts from external threats toward internal Others, drawing diverse Others into a convergent logic of exclusion. These shifts channel racial, partisan, and cultural tensions into symbolic antagonists, narrowing the imagined boundaries of the “true” people, reinforcing authoritarian tendencies, and contributing to the erosion of trust in democratic institutions. The study highlights othering as an adaptive discursive resource through which right-wing populist mobilization and antagonistic alignments are mutually reinforced, thereby sustaining the dynamic construction of the Other.

Modal auxiliaries (e.g., ‘will’, must’) are a language area of interest to threat assessment professionals as a means for discerning authorial commitment to imagined future violence. Yet, how do modal auxiliaries pattern in authentic threats and how does this compare to the way their use is characterized in the threat assessment literature? This study analyzes modals in fourteen authentic ‘pledges to harm’ — a threat targeting a grammatical 3rd Person (e.g., ‘I will kill him/her/them’). Primary findings include: pledge authors who did not act on their violent ideations nevertheless present themselves as both more capable of and more inclined to violence, especially via frequent use of modal ‘will’. Meanwhile, pledge authors who proceeded to real-world violence use a combination of 1st Person subject + requirement modal + proposal of violence to present themselves as morally compelled to attack (e.g., “I must kill”), a construction which appears nowhere in the non-realized texts.

Journalists and governments have highlighted growing concerns over the mainstreaming of misogynistic ideologies due to manfluencers like Andrew Tate. Yet, little linguistic research has been done to confirm Tate meets the criteria for being (or even wants to be considered) mainstream. This paper begins to address this gap. We use the reality paradigms (RP) concept in combination with key semantic field analysis to analyse Tate’s professional website, “Cobratate”, comparing it with comments about him/his views taken from 50 ideologically diverse sub-Reddits and the British Press. We thus focus on instances of Tate attempting to manipulate the RPs of others for his own egoistic gain and what the posters/journalists’ language use tells us about their perceptions of Tate. While all regularly discuss similar topics around women, money, maleness, veracity, etc., the posters/journalists overwhelmingly critique the manfluencer’s views on them. We go on to suggest that discussions around the extent of Tate’s “mainstream” status would, therefore, benefit from being more nuanced than they appear to be currently. Such discussions might consider whether he needs to appear frequently in traditional media outlets and have the content of his ideas accepted by the same/their readership to be considered truly mainstream or whether it is enough for him to have a “celebrity” presence, albeit a controversial one. If the latter, discussions might further consider what an influencer like Tate gains from being “mainstream” for a certain (younger) audience only, because of his online presence, while still being critiqued by the population more generally.

This study investigates legitimation efforts in Russian state-affiliated televisual media discourse seeking sanction for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Television is investigated since it has not only been under-researched in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) in general, but also because it remains the most consumed medium in Russia. One programme is selected for analysis: Vremya (‘Time’) broadcast on Russia’s biggest state-controlled channel, Channel One. The analysis seeks to gain insight into Russia’s newly emerged rhetoric on Ukraine post-full-scale invasion. It finds several legitimation strategies used by the programme to justify the invasion, including authority, reasoning, past/future imaginaries, morality, altruism, and blaming and defaming.

What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask on what grounds a speaker can be labelled as offended, even when the speaker does not claim any feelings of offence, as well as to what extent a speaker can deny being offended, when appearing to, indeed, be offended. We present a case study of an interaction from Twitter (X) stemming from an instance of failed humour, exploring the linguistic cues that people rely on when judging others to be offended. We find that disputes regarding offence are not actually necessarily to do with one’s feelings at all but instead relate to whether someone’s emotional involvement is perceived to be a barrier to their objectivity and argumentative strength.

While many studies have recently addressed and deconstructed rightwing online language aggression and strategies of Othering, it is seldom considered how such bellicose messages are rendered culturally plausible and, as such, “recognizable” to mainstream publics. This article addresses the issue by comparing how the Norwegian extreme-right media outlet the Human Rights Service (HRS) discursively constructs Muslim and so-called non-Western immigrant identities in relation to Self/Other distinctions frequently encountered in Hollywood war cinema. Identifying three shared framing patterns — (a) differential allocation of (de)humanizing characteristics, (b) regulation of facial recognition, and (c) restricted perspective-taking — it argues that a structurally similar framework for Manichean conflict perception extends from popular war culture into public political discourse. Attention is directed to how the HRS’s representations play into, and draw tacit plausibility from, broader interpretive frames and how political rhetoric about incomprehensible, evil “Others” may assert their discursive effects by resonating with hegemonic backgrounds of meaning.

Insults are a well-recognized form of conventionalized impoliteness, yet little research explores their proliferation and conventionalization. This study analyzes Trump’s initial use of fake news as an insult during and after a 2017 press conference, followed by a diachronic examination of his usage of it on X (then Twitter) through January 2021. Through these two case studies, fake news is shown to have rapidly evolved into a conventionalized insult that can be used as a personalized negative assertion (e.g., “You are fake news!”) and as third-person negative references either as a stand-alone insult (e.g., “He is fake news!”) or as part of pejorative nicknames (e.g., “Fake News CNN”). Its spread was driven not only by Trump’s notoriety but also by the media’s amplification of it that inadvertently reinforced its use among Trump, his supporters, and others.

This study explores the effectiveness of verbal de-escalation strategies in reducing social media outrage, particularly focusing on bystanders’ roles in mitigating aggression from hostile posters. Based on the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), four response styles — two divergent, one convergent, and one maintaining — were evaluated. This theory suggests that an adapting communication style (convergence) should reduce hostility differently from diverging or maintaining styles. Eighty-four participants read scenarios involving verbal aggression and responded to a questionnaire on tone, bystander response, and expected outcomes. The results showed that divergent communication, using modality markers (e.g., “maybe,” “could”), was most effective in calming aggressors. Downgraders (e.g., “a little bit”) also reduced aggression, though to a lesser degree. A qualitative analysis of the open-ended question confirmed that modality markers were more successful than other strategies. The study emphasizes the importance of rhetorical choices in managing online conflict.

Despite the growing visibility of transgender individuals globally, Nigeria remains a context marked by conservative social norms and legal restrictions against gender non-conformity. Previous studies on the linguistic construction of sexual minorities in the Nigerian context have mainly focused on gay men and lesbian women, without adequate attention being paid to how trans people are represented. This study, however, considers the discourse surrounding trans identities via a specific case study: a Nigerian social media influencer and trans woman, Bobrisky, whose win as the best-dressed female at a movie premiere in March 2024 led to widespread media discourse. Through the analysis of Facebook posts, this study employs van Dijk’s social cognition approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine public opinion about Bobrisky’s award, shedding light on the ideologies of Nigerians towards gender identity, social perceptions, and cultural attitudes. The analysis found that linguistic and discursive strategies are employed in public discourses on Bobrisky to reinforce prevailing stereotypes and stigmas surrounding transgender identity. The discourses on Bobrisky typically reproduce cisnormative assumptions about binary sex, and that implicitly and explicitly transphobic language is often used to frame trans identities as unacceptable. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the social construction of gender and the challenges faced by transgender individuals in Nigeria.