Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 10:2 (2022) ► pp.315–350
Identity, ideology and threatening communication
An investigation of patterns of attitude in terrorist discourse
Published online: 5 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00058.eta
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00058.eta
Abstract
Linguistic analysis of the interpersonal patterning of threatening communication is a means of uncovering the attitudes,
ideological orientation, and hostile intentions of perpetrators of violence in terrorist discourse (Gales, Tammy. 2010. “Ideologies of Violence: A Corpus and Discourse Analytic Approach to Stance in Threatening Communications”. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California., Gales, Tammy. 2010. “Ideologies of Violence: A Corpus and Discourse Analytic Approach to Stance in Threatening Communications”. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California.). Corpus analysis focused on attitudinal meaning also offers a
diagnostic for characterizing the personal and relational identities (. 2010. “Corpus Linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics: Interpersonal Meaning, Identity and Bonding in Popular Culture.” In New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation, edited by Monika Bednarek and James Martin, 237–266. London: Continuum.) manifest in
such texts. This paper explores discursive patterns of authorial identity in terrorist communication in a set of post-9/11 terrorist public
statements made by former al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. It draws on the Appraisal framework (Martin, James, and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ), a model of evaluative language developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to investigate the
interpersonal component in this dataset. Specifically, patterns of attitude provide evidence of relational and actional attitude,
and personal and relational identities. Negative judgement was found to characterize the encoded attitude in terms of (i)
construing aggression and conflicting moral values (e.g., social sanction underpinning a perceived personal duty) and (ii) enacting
the author’s aggressive and aloof identity, and violent actional attitude.
Keywords: aggression, attitudinal meaning, conflict, identity, terrorist discourse
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Attitudinal stance and identity
- 2.Attitudinal patterning of identity
- 3.Theoretical framework: The appraisal framework
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Data
- 4.2Procedure of analysis
- 5.Findings and discussion
- 5.1Encoded attitude in the dataset
- 5.2Judgement of participants and characteristic personal and relational identity
- 6.Conclusion and further research
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