Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Online First

The 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 theory of helping behaviour in emergency ( Darley and Latané 1968 ) and 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 presence of a moderate level of anger.

In 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.

This 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.

This 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.