Title: | Pledging to harm: A linguistic appraisal analysis of judgment comparing realized and non-realized violent fantasies; |
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Authors and Corporations: | , |
In: | Discourse & Society, 30, 2019, 2, p. 154-171 |
published: |
SAGE Publications
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Media Type: | Article, E-Article |
Physical Description: | 154-171 |
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ISSN: |
0957-9265
1460-3624 |
DOI: | 10.1177/0957926518816195 |
published in: | Discourse & Society |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Collection: | SAGE Publications (CrossRef) |
<jats:p> Intent is a psychological quality that threat assessors view as a required step on a threatener’s pathway to action. Recognizing the presence of intent in threatening language is therefore crucial to determining whether a threat is credible. Nevertheless, a ‘lack of empirical guidance’ (p. 326) is available concerning how violent intent is expressed linguistically. Using the subsystem of judgment in Appraisal analysis, this study compares realized with non-realized ‘pledges to harm’, revealing occasionally counterintuitive patterns of stancetaking by both author types – for example, that the non-realized texts are both prosodically more violent and more threatening, while the realized pledges are more ethically nuanced – which may begin to shed light on which attitudinal markers reliably correlate with an author’s intention to do future harm. </jats:p> |