Metaphors, powerlessness and online aggression

A lockdown was imposed in Wuhan, China, the alleged epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak, on 23 January 2020. Rattled by the short notice and severity of the restrictions, many grabbed the last opportunity to escape, an act widely criticised on Weibo, China’s popular microblogging site. This study aims to examine the unsavoury discourse deployed by Weibo users to express impoliteness and discursively construct negative identities of the lockdown escapees. Posts on Weibo criticising, reporting and threatening the escapees were analysed, revealing that the escapees were dehumanised through vivid animal metaphors to highlight their irresponsibility and call for their punishment. Animal metaphors can co-occur with various impoliteness triggers to intensify offensiveness, heightening the hostility of interlocutors towards a target. This use of metaphors also showcases online users’ anger, distrust, and hatred towards the escapees, their solidarity-seeking behaviour online and their irrationality.

Love thy ‘populist’

This article aims to deepen our understanding of scandals involving both transgression of accepted speech and populist logic by analysing the origins, development, and outcome of a 2018 Czech media controversy. The scandal erupted when a public service radio station was accused of airing pornographic content. It escalated when the accuser added a xenophobic, homophobic and nativist commentary to his complaint. By analysing each party’s arguments, the contested and silenced ideas, and the fantasmatic dimension, I demonstrate how each actor contributed to the escalation of the conflict and facilitated a shift in accepted public conduct. I propose to view such scandals as attempts to break hegemonic silence that reveal the lack of acceptance of a new norm, in this case homosexuality. I conclude that such scandals can support dialogue and reduce the polarization of society if dissenting views are taken into consideration and divisive language avoided by all sides.

Countering linguistic violence by place-making in the public space

Much is discussed in the literature about the Arabization of Algeria’s public space since its independence from France in 1962. This privileging of the contest between Arabic and French eclipses the stake claimed by speakers of Tamazight, the Afro-Asiatic language spoken by the majority in the historic province of Kabylia, to the east of the capital Algiers. Taking the wilaya of Tizi-Ouzou, in the heart of Kabylia, as the focus for this article, we adopt a performative approach to exploring the making of place, and in particular a Tamazightophone space, by triangulating traditional Linguistic Landscape data, interviews with residents, and 200 years of competing language management strategies. In response to the linguistic violence perpetrated by French colonial powers and aggressive Arabisation policies, we investigate how the discourses of place, particularly Amazigh cultural and linguistic identity, challenge the double erasure of Tamazight.

Verbal horror and slaughterhouse imagery in media representation of herdsmen violence

Nigerian media reports on herdsmen’s violence present dehumanised images of a slaughterhouse in which farmers are represented as animals being slaughtered by herders. Using a critical discourse analysis and appraisal framework, with a focus on the systems of attitude and graduation, this paper critically examines media representation of herdsmen’s violence as “butchering” in the form of carnism. Analysis reveals that carnist representation is reinforced through death-dealing socio-cognitive labelling, attitudinal lexicalisation and strands of carnism. Also, using attitude and graduation resources, a one-directional and horrific image is painted. The study concludes that the creation as well as consumption of such scary news cultivates cognitive prejudices and stereotypes.

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate”

The diplomatic relationship between the USA and Iran has long been fraught and is characterised by various conflicts and the implementation of economic sanctions. It can be argued that the relationship became even more hostile after Donald Trump was elected president of the US. Trump’s sentiments towards Iran were made public through his behavior on Twitter, both before and after he took over the Presidency. These sentiments have been a mix of negative and sometimes positive views and opinions. This study uses a corpus of Trump’s tweets that explicitly mention ‘Iran’ as the basis of a linguistic analysis and applies to it the analytical framework of appraisal from Systemic Functional Linguistics. More specifically, this study focuses on how he established an Us vs. Them dichotomy. While the analysis shows that Iran has been generally portrayed negatively by Trump, there were several tweets where the Iranian government was appraised positively, too. More interestingly, in those tweets, he seemed to target Obama and democrats and represent them negatively while Iran was assessed in positive terms.

“The people watching at home”

This paper explores disagreement practice in political discourse, specifically in the under explored public inquiry communicative event and more specifically in the select-committee hearing. We revisit earlier work on theorising disagreement to expand our understanding of its contextual nature, particularly in relation to the making of ideology. Public inquiries combine the characteristics of professional meetings with characteristics of political discourse. They are typified by hybridised and ambiguous role expectations which participants negotiate in and through (potentially competing) practices in doing the ideological work demanded by the policy process. In this context, disagreement emerges as expected and key to the performance of the interactants’ situated and explicit/semi-permanent roles as professional politicians. By applying Critical Interactional Sociolinguistic analysis within a wider frame of audience design, we demonstrate the importance of the ideological role of disagreement to the policy process. We argue that further attention needs to be given to the policy talk in meso-level political events, such as the public inquiry, which connect the ideological (macro) political domains of human activity with the (micro) here and now of talk. We close the paper with directions for further research.

Impoliteness in hip-hop music

The aim of this paper is to examine the functionality of impoliteness strategies as rhetorical devices employed by acclaimed African American and White hip-hop artists. It focuses on the social and artistic function of the key discursive element of hip-hop, namely aggressive language. The data for this paper comprise songs of US African American and White performers retrieved from the November 2017 ‘TOP100 Chart’ for international releases on Spotify.com. A cursory look at the sub-corpora (Black male/ Black female/ White male/ White female artists’ sub-corpus) revealed the prominence of the ‘use taboo words’ impoliteness strategy. The analysis of impoliteness instantiations by considering race and gender as determining factors in the lyrics selection process unveiled that both male groups use impoliteness strategies more frequently than female groups. It is also suggested that Black male and White female singers employ impoliteness to resist oppression, offer a counter-narrative about their own experience and self (re)presentation and reinforce in group solidarity.

Impoliteness across social media platforms

This paper responds to the call for more comparative research across online social media platforms (Graham and Hardaker 2017, 808) and examines discourse across two such platforms, YouTube and Reddit. More specifically, it attempts to investigate whether the affordances of these platforms have an impact on the amount and form of impoliteness employed by their users. Data on a highly contested topic (the July 2018 wildfires in Attica, Greece) is studied both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, small but representative samples are qualitatively analyzed on the basis of the two major impoliteness types: implicational and conventionalized, and their subcategories. In addition, swearword keywords extracted by means of corpus analysis tools are analyzed. It is shown that YouTube involves a great deal of (conventionalized) impoliteness (Culpeper 2011a) which could be due to factors such as the total absence of moderation, of post length limit and of detailed personal profiles as well as the presence of videos as stimuli for interaction. Considerably less impoliteness appears on Reddit, whose forum-like nature makes it a place that mostly invites civil interaction. Implicationally impolite (Culpeper 2011a) posts outnumber conventionally impolite ones, perhaps owing to the heavy moderation, the existence of public profiles and the size and coherence of the user community. It is concluded that, due to their characteristics, platforms seem to attract a certain userbase with its own motives and mindset, which in turn shape the impoliteness found within them.

Patterns of conflict speech and young adult feminist identity construction on Tumblr

Interactions on social media platforms are becoming increasingly relevant from an identity construction perspective. Conflict speech, in particular, is a form of interaction that is especially common in online spaces and constructs identity through polarization, strengthening the in-group while deemphasizing the out-group. The young adult feminist identity has established a strong presence in online spaces, specifically the microblogging platform Tumblr. This study seeks to analyze the role of conflict speech in young adult feminist identity construction through focusing on recontextualization of comments and name-calling strategies. Within this analysis, it is possible to determine the importance of conflict speech as it strengthens the collective feminist identity while allowing those in the in-group to exclude and dismiss conflictual comments stemming from those in the out-group.