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The language of threats
Abstract
Whether or not a message is a threat will usually depend upon several factors , such as the intent of the speaker, the understanding of the hearer, and the context of the utterance. This paper examines how the language and the context combine to determine the degree of threat and the degree of lawfulness or otherwise in an utterance. However, because the interaction of language and context is inherently and ultimately unpredictable, it is surprisingly - if not impossibly - difficult to construct a context-independent definition of ' threat'.
... Communicated threats operate within the context of threatener-threatened interpersonal relations and attitudes (Etaywe, 2022a;Gales, 2011;Storey, 1995), making threatening communication an intersubjective process par excellence. Forensic discourse analysis of criminal texts, particularly those involving terrorist threats, seeks to unravel these interpersonal elements, including the ideological schemas of violent extremists (Shuy, 2021) and text functions influenced by ideologies and context-dependent factors (Coulthard et al., 2017). ...
... A productive line of research into communicated threats is the pragmatics-based approach, focusing on the internal properties of single-sentence utterances conceived as 'the speech act of threatening' (Berk-Seligson and Seligson, 2016;Culpeper, 2011;Limberg, 2009;Shon, 2005;Storey, 1995). According to this research tradition, the function of the speech act of threatening is of a 'directive-commissive' illocutionary point (Salgueiro, 2010: 214); that is, an utterance aims to influence the threatened party to (not) do something and represent a commitment by the threatener to undertake the proposed action (e.g. ...
... In other words, evaluative couplings target victims solely based on their membership in a different social category -achieved through the use of lexicogrammatical elements such as verbs like 'want', 'wish' and 'hope', along with descriptions of desires and fantasies (Kushneruk, 2017). The boulomaic function is rooted in master 'identity attacks' (Culpeper et al., 2017;Etaywe, forthcoming, 2004), violent fantasies that express a commitment to cause harm (Hurt and Grant, 2019), and the threat aim of frightening (Storey, 1995). • • Examining the justification practices: To obtain a fine-grained categorisation of the regulatory functions and how the threat texts function to position victims and justify violence, a complementary form of analysis was carried out, examining how the following tactics were used and made use of the evaluative couplings (explained in the next Section): ...
This article explores the under-researched area of discursive tactics employed in terrorist threat texts that exploit moral values to constantly justify violence, fostering a ‘discourse of justification’, disaffiliation and conflict. Employing a discursive pragmatic analysis, it delves into the tactics of violent extremists associated with jihadism and far-right ideologies. Utilising the Appraisal framework and the ‘moral disaffiliation’ strategy, the study uncovers verbal practices shaping a dynamic of justification. Findings reveal threateners’ involvement in regulatory discursive functions – manipulation, deontic-retaliation, and boulomaic effect – and practices of ideologically positioning functions – discrediting, blaming, denying and (de)legitimating. The analysis highlights the construction of negative victim individuals and societies while praising the threatener/in-group, anchored predominantly in values of propriety, capacity, valuation and veracity, as the primary dynamic of threatener-victim disalignment. This study contributes insights into threatener profiling, motivations of violence and future research on threat-genre rhetorical structure analysis.
... Threats, then, are a social phenomenon-not an individual one. Threats cannot be defined outside of their context, i.e., they are created from and situated within the socio-historic period in which they are composed (Bourdieu, 1991;Storey, 1995). As such, they need to be investigated through a linguistic construct that views language as a part of the larger social semiotic system of meaning, at the very core of which are an author's culturally-organized "personal feelings, attitudes, value judgements 5 , or assessments" about the theme, recipient, or proposition being presented (Biber et al., 1999: 966). ...
... However, it must be pointed out that even in cases of conditional threats, the speaker, as the holder of the power in the relationship (Bourdieu, 1991), may still choose to abide by the conditions of the threat or not. Like other speech acts viewed through the "ethnocentric prescriptivism" of Grice's (1975) conversational implicatures (Hanks, 1996: 101), the maxim of quality, which requires the speaker to tell the truth and the hearer to assume the truth is being told, is not always adhered to in the case of threats (Storey, 1995). Finally, Fraser adds that only in the case of promising must the speaker commit to the act. ...
... The act of threatening, here, is not dependent on the perlocutionary effect, i.e., an utterance, so long as it meets the aforementioned three criteria, is still defined as a successful threat even if the hearer does not interpret it as such (ibid.). Storey (1995), however, moves beyond the notion that a threat can be defined by the intent of the speaker alone. In her terms, two further components need to exist in order to define a threat-the perlocutionary effect and the context. ...
Awarding Institution: University of California Davis, USA
Date of Award: June 2010
Because of the dangerous nature of threats, investigators must immediately ask: Is the intent real? Is the threatener likely to act? With real lives at risk, using the linguistic information available to answer these questions quickly and accurately is of great importance. Yet, because most scholarship on threats has focused exclusively on behavioral characteristics or on their relation to individual linguistic forms (e.g., Rosenfeld and Harmon 2002, Meloy and Hoff mann 2008, Smith 2008), there is still a substantial lack of understanding of the discursive nature of threatening language and a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating how threateners encode their level of commitment to the proposed act or reveal their attitudes about the victim. Th e purpose of this research, then, is to explore the ways in which nterpersonal stances, or a speaker or writer’s commitment to or attitudes about a person or proposition (Biber et al. 1999), are manifested and function in threatening communications.
... Threats, verbal and written, are considered to be pure language crimes (see Storey 1995), as they are committed through the act of uttering threatening words or writing them in a letter. The Internet provides plenty of opportunities for anyone who intends to send a threatening message (see Wallace 1999) and based on the International Crime Victims Survey which was administered to more than 300,000 people over the past 20 years, it is estimated that around one-quarter of all threatening communications are sent via some form of electronic device (Spitzberg 2002). ...
... Previously, researchers (e.g. Storey 1995, Fraser 1998, Napier & Mardigian 2003, Gales 2010 have distinguished between different types of threats. Generally speaking, threats have been classified into the following categories: direct, indirect, and conditional. ...
This paper addresses the problem of disguise in written threatening messages and investigates the connection between (meta-)linguistic awareness and the successful implementation of disguise strategies through the use of two experimental studies. The first study, a language production experiment with 116 participants, focused on the actual use of disguise strategies in the participants’ written texts. The second study, which had 167 respondents, was designed to investigate the perception of threats and respondents’ awareness and ideas of disguise. The findings of these studies indicate that sociolinguistic and metalinguistic awareness, awareness of one's own language production and the ability to manipulate language in other than outer forms of words are closely connected, which has important implications for forensic authorship analyses. Bredthauer (2013) estimated that approximately 20% of the authentic threatening messages in her corpus contained some form of disguise.
... (1) Keisha, if you move into this neighborhood, I will see to it that you wake up tomorrow to a cross-burning on your front lawn! (2) If you move here, you might wake up to a nasty surprise! Example (1) contains many of the characteristics that have been identified as typifying threatening utterances: (i) the addressor expresses personal intent to commit a future negative action [Y] against the addressee; and (ii) the commission of this negative action is made contingent upon the addressee's failure to comply with the addressor's directive [X] (Fraser 1975(Fraser , 1998Storey 1995;Gales 2015Gales , 2011. The ATC in (1) can therefore be said to be not only directive, but also coercive: yet another hallmark of threatening utterances (Glukhov & Martynova 2015). ...
... If one were to take (2) on face-value alone, an equally convincing case could potentially be made for arguing that it is not a malicious threat at all but rather a neutral prediction or even a well-intended warning. Linguistic research informed by speech act theory has offered great assistance in helping to resolve such classificatory ambiguities (Shuy 1993, Storey 1995, Fraser 1998, Walton 2000, Salguiero 2010, Gales 2015, Berk-Seligson & Seligson 2016. According to this work, the key to drawing the lines of demarcation is to examine not only the words contained in the utterance (locution), but also their collective communicative intention (illocution) and consequences (perlocution). ...
On January 20, 2017, Republican candidate Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The run-up to this inauguration was marked by unusually hostile political rhetoric. For many, this linguistic divisiveness was fodder for the post-election surge in physical and verbal aggression. Using a mixed-method approach that combines actuarial and speech act assessment, this study examines 30 Anonymous Threatening Communications sent during the US presidential election for the presence and prevalence of (para)linguistic features associated with verbal and physical threat. The article argues for more forensic linguistic research into mainstream producers and consumers of hate-filled political rhetoric.
... The third kind, the indirect threat, is the type of threat that is most difficult to identify as such, as it may masquerade as some other kind of speech act. It may simultaneously be interpretable as a warning, as helpful advice, or as a complaint, so its classification as a threat depends heavily upon how the listener reacts to it (Gingiss 1986;Napier & Mardigian 2003;Smith 2008;Storey 1995;Yamanaka 1995). Part of what makes this sort of oblique utterance a threat is the supposition on the hearer's part that the speaker is potentially capable of performing some action that would materially disadvantage the hearer, or someone else. ...
... We cannot engage here very fully with the ways in which the wording of these sections of the Act might be interpreted generally, let alone in any specific case. These are tasks best handled by specialists in legal language, and linguists who concern themselves with the pragmatic functions of different sorts of speech acts, including forensic linguists (see further Austin 1962;Shavell 1993;Rothchild 1998;Searle 1969Searle , 1975Searle , 1979Smith 2008;Storey 1995;Salgueiro 2010;Tiersma & Solan 2012). However, we deal briefly below with some of the principal themes of earlier research on threatening language, which has largely dwelt upon discussion of what lends a linguistic construction the status of a threat and whether it is to be treated as a 'legal' threat versus an illegal one. ...
Although verbal threats are a very common kind of language crime, the ways in which listeners interpret ostensibly ‘neutral’ utterances as threats are currently poorly understood. We present the results of an experiment in which monolingual English-speaking listeners were exposed to the same innocuously-worded phrase spoken in a ‘neutral’ or a ‘threatening’ way. They heard translations of the phrase in four unknown foreign languages as well as the original form in English. The listeners were asked to rate the utterances with respect to two perceived properties: (a) how threatening they thought the utterances sounded, and (b) how much ‘intent’ to carry out a harmful act the listeners inferred from the talker’s speech. As predicted, the listeners assigned higher threat and intent ratings to the ‘threatening’ utterances in both English and the foreign languages than they did to the neutral ones. However, the listeners’ ratings were considerably higher for both threatening and neutral utterances spoken in English than they were for the foreign language utterances. In the English condition there was also a much larger difference between the neutral and the threat utterances with respect to the overall perceived threat and intent ratings than there was for the foreign language utterances. This suggests that correctly interpreting the threatening utterances as threats is dependent upon familiarity with the language in which they were spoken. A gender effect was also found, whereby male listeners assigned higher threat and intent ratings than did women. It is suggested that men and women may respond differently to speech cues associated with threatening behaviour.
... A Storey in his study in 1995 described the language people use during a threat as expressions that leave a negative effect, such as injury, material loss or stress [50]. Although the scale of potential threats is unlimited, not all of them are relevant in the context of the local community and not all of them are possible to detect. ...
In the paper, the authors present the outcome of web scraping software allowing for the automated classification of threats and crisis events detection. In order to improve the safety and comfort of human life, an analysis was made to quickly detect threats using a modern information channel such as social media. For this purpose, social media services that are popular in the examined region were reviewed and the appropriate ones were selected using the criteria of accessibility and popularity. Approximately 300 unique posts from local groups of cities and other administrative centers were collected and analyzed. The decision of which entry was classified as a threat was defined using the ChatGPT tool and the human expert. Both variants were tested using machine learning (ML) methods. The paper tested whether the ChatGPT tool would be effective at detecting presumed events and compared this approach to the classic ML approach.
... Threatening. Disagreement may arise from texts containing linguistically violent expressions or threats and depend on annotators' sensitivity to verbal violence and menaces (Storey, 1995), see for instance, the following text: ...
... I define language of threat as expressions that convey a sense of danger, harm, or aggression toward a referent or addressee. It usually involves intimidation, force, or manipulation and can be interpreted differently across audiences and contexts (Storey, 2013). These contexts could depend on the tone of the speech, syntax, and semantic content of the threatening language, as well as the socio-cultural factors that shape its use and reception. ...
This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by Oduduwa secessionists to construct polarization and otherness on Twitter. Using the socio-cognitive approach to CDA combined with social media CDA, the study illustrates how socio-cultural and spatiotemporal contexts are embedded in digital performances of resistance. Findings show that the secessionists employ four main discursive strategies, namely: (1) vitriolic socio-cognitive labels and coinages; (2) generalization and ethnocentrism; (3) language of threat; and (4) use of Yoruba language to legitimize their resistance, accentuate their ideological stances, construct polarization and otherness, and do social mobilization. These strategies are achieved via discursive, linguistic, and stylo-orthographic resources made available by digital technology. The paper concludes that the discursive strategies employed by the secessionists do not directly reflect polarization but are simply constitutive of it.
... Indeed, the expertise of (forensic) linguists can contribute a wide array of insights relevant to threat and terrorism investigations. Linguistics has been applied to threat assessment (e.g., Storey, 1995;Solan & Tiersma, 2005;Smith, 2008;Gales, 2010Gales, , 2011van der Vegt, 2021), profiling and authorship analysis in relation to terrorism (e.g., Abbasi & Chen, 2005;Leonard, Ford & Christensen, 2017;DANTE, 2019:37-41;Aston University, 2022), the analysis of the (psycho)linguistic features of mass attackers' (cf. Hamlett, 2017;Brindle, 2018;Kupper & Meloy, 2021;Hunter & Grant, 2022) and terrorists' discourse (e.g., Johansson, Kaati & Sahlgren, 2016;Giménez & Queralt, 2021). ...
Three homemade audiovisual recordings filmed a few days before the 2017 terrorist attacks to Barcelona and Cambrils by some individuals involved in these events were weighed as evidence during the trial held at the Audiencia Nacional between November, 10 2020, and May, 27 2021. No expert in linguistics analyzed this evidence in the proceedings. In Spain, the literature on jihadist terrorism has focused on the process of radicalization (Vicente, 2018), including the use of digital media for this purpose (Torralba, 2019) and the importance of counter-narratives to battle it. However, few studies have analyzed terrorist productions from a linguistic perspective. This study examines the recordings screened in the trial for the 2017 attacks through the lens of the comprehensive model for pragmatic and discourse analysis put forward by Fuentes Rodríguez (2000, 2009). Results show how various linguistic devices perform multiple functions at the super-, macro- and microstructural levels, allowing the participants to address various audiences and fulfill three communicative goals. Participants claim membership of a jihadist community and convey a message aimed, on the one hand, to intimidate the viewers they discursively construct as their opponents and, on the other, to obtain recognition from those that share their ideological stance. The discursive singularities of these recordings and their commonalities with productions linked to other forms of terrorism are discussed against the literature.
... Other studies into the act of threatening tend to focus on the internal properties of single-sentence utterances [24,53,60] and the level of impoliteness in these utterances [14]. Such utterances are conceived as the speech act of 'threatening' which is with a "directive-commissive" illocutionary point [50, p. 214], and of primary features of explicitness: the conditionality structure, futurity signals, violent verbs, mention of and focus on participants, mention of weapons and swear words, as realised in an utterance such as 'I'm going to kill you [roaches], you'll see' [39, p. 181]. ...
Unlike one-to-one threats, terrorist threat texts constitute a form of violence and a language crime that is committed in a complex context of public intimidation and are communicated publicly and designed strategically to force desired sociopolitical changes (Etaywe, 2022a). Contributing to law enforcement and threat assessors' fuller understanding of the discursive nature of threat texts in terrorism context, this paper examines how language is used dialogically to communicate threats and to construct both the purpose of threatened actions and the victims. The paper uses a critical discourse analytic approach and takes a set of eleven digital threat texts made by two jihadists as a case study. It draws on van Dijk's (1995) concept of ideology, the law enforcement-based taxonomy of threat types (Napier & Mardigian, 2003), van Leeuwen's (2008) model of social actor representation and discursive construction of purpose of social actions, and Martin and White's (2005) Engagement system. The analysis reveals victims specified and genericised, excluded and adversary. This linguistic construction is underpinned by a dichotomous conceptualisation of the social actors' affiliations, positions, values, cultural activities, goals, and material and symbolic resources. The threats are delivered to the victims, agents acting on their behalf (e.g. security forces) or property associated with them (e.g. oil refinery), and are of two primary types-direct, and veiled. The former are predominant and serve inter alia to augment the public-intimidation impact of terrorist discourse. Threatened violence is of goal-, means-and/or effect-oriented social purposes, which suggest a categorisation of threats based on these purposes. The analysis reveals a dialectic, refutative nature of argumentation, and a discourse pregnant with heteroglossic utterances that contract (i) to close off and disalign with state officials' contradictory voices, and (ii) to produce tension, providing clues to terrorists' motivations and what constitutes the heart of political violence.
... Since threateners risk legal sanction, we see alleged threats being fervently denied by their originators (Bojsen-Møller et al. 2020: 3). Attempting to delimit and assess the highly heterogeneous (Bojsen-Møller et al. 2020;Gales 2010;Limberg 2009;Muschalik 2018;Storey 1995) genre of threatening communications is therefore an important and complex task for legal systems across the world. Prototypical direct threats (such as 'I'm gonna kill you') are easy to recognise. ...
This article examines what happens when two disparate types of genres collide, here the heterogeneous and illicit genre of threatening communications on the one hand and the fixed and institutional legal genres of legislation, indictments and verdicts on the other. By following the different uptakes (Freadman 1994, 2002) – including the specific types of textual travels (Heffer, Rock and Conley 2013) – of threatening communications into judgments from 50 Danish threat cases, the author both considers how this central piece of language evidence is relayed to the courts and how the overall genre of threats is taken up by the Danish legal system. The findings show that some of the instability of the genre of threats rub off onto the indictments, specifically in their task of relaying the linguistic evidence of oral threats as accurately and transparently as possible. The study concludes that each genre in the legal genre set (Devitt 1991) plays a distinctive role in managing the collision between the heterogeneity of threats and the stringency of the legal system.
... However, the emphasis on intent alone has been debated, with scholars arguing that the speaker's intention, or lack thereof, does not determine whether the statement is considered threatening or not. Linguist Kate Storey argues that the context in which a statement is made, and the interpretation of the hearer are necessary when determining whether the said statement is a threat or not [30]. For instance, the phrase "I'm going to find you. . ...
Threat moderation on social media has been subject to much public debate and criticism, especially for its broadly permissive approach. In this paper, we focus on Twitter's Violent Threats policy, highlighting its shortcomings by comparing it to linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. Specifically, we foreground the importance of accounting for the lived experiences of harassment—how people perceive and react to a tweet—a measure largely disregarded by Twitter's Violent Threats policy but a core part of linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. To illustrate this, we examine three tweets by drawing upon these frameworks. These tweets showcase the racist, sexist, and abusive language used in threats towards those who have been marginalized. Through our analysis, we highlight how content moderation policies, despite their stated goal of promoting free speech, in effect, work to inhibit it by fostering an online toxic environment that precipitates self-censorship in fear of violence and retaliation. In doing so, we make a case for technology designers and policy makers working in the sphere of content moderation to craft approaches that incorporate the various nuanced dimensions of threat assessment toward a more inclusive and open environment for online discourse. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains strong and violent language. Please use discretion when reading, printing, or recommending this paper.
... Die ausschließlich männliche Form darf hier wohl als den Adressierungen in den Quellen selbst entsprechend gelten. 9 Zur Drohung aus rechtslinguistischer Perspektive vgl.Storey (2013) 10 Die Rechtssprache hat auch für die moderne Sprechakttheorie besondere Relevanz, da die gerichtliche oder zumindest rechtlich relevante Feststellung und mithin Schaffung von Tatsachen wie etwa bei einem Schuldspruch als klarer Fall einer performativen, wirklichkeitsstiftenden Sprechhandlung gelten kann (für eine aktuelle Diskussion vgl. die Beiträge inBülow et al. 2016). ...
... Grundlagen für die Untersuchung von Sprache in Drohungen haben unter anderem Storey (1995) und Fraser (1998 (2000). Sie unternimmt eine vierteilige Einordnung der Drohungen in direkte, indirekte, maskierte und konditionale Drohungen. ...
... There are many scientific research works, especially linguistic and socio-psychological ones, devoted to the problem of threat (Spitzberg & Gawron, 2016). The general definition describes threat as a kind of verbal manipulation to wake up fear, to cause the change of social behavior or social status of a person who is affected by the threat (Storey, 2013). ...
... Threat assessment is a set of techniques used by forensic linguists to identify and assess the risks of emerging threats (actual, inherent, potential) as well as the risk of perpetrators carrying them out [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. The anonymous threat is a problem that requires careful assessment. ...
... The difference in the singular versus plural pronoun use may also be an ideological one: an individual associated with terrorism may act alone when making threats but may be making them on behalf of an ideology shared by others (who may not be aware of the author's threats). Storey (1995) discusses threats made by terrorist organizations, noting that the "sense of the threat is heightened by the whole image of the organization making that threat" (p. 78). ...
Using a speech act approach, this paper examines the similarities and differences between English-language threats made by terrorists and those made by non-terrorists, with a focus on pronoun use and sentence-type. Both groups employ a variety of sentence-types in their threats, but use declarative statements most often. 1 st person nominative pronouns occur as subjects of clauses much more frequently than 2 nd person pronouns in both the terrorist and non-terrorist threat data. Non-terrorist threats, however, make significantly more use of the 1 st person singular nominative pronoun, while terrorist threats use the 1 st person plural nominative pronoun more frequently.
Spoken threats are a common but linguistically complex language crime. Although threatening language has been examined from different linguistic perspectives, there is limited research which critically addresses how people perceive spoken threats and infer traits such as threat and intent from speakers' voices. There is also minimal linguistic research addressing differences between written and spoken threats. By specifically analysing threats delivered in both written and spoken modalities, as well as integrating perceptual phonetic analysis into discussions on spoken threats, this Element offers perspectives on these two under-researched areas. It highlights the dangers of assuming that the way in which someone sounds correlates with, for example, their intention to commit harm, and explores potential problems in assuming that written and spoken threats are equivalent to one another. The goal of the Element is to advance linguistic knowledge and understanding around spoken threats, as well as promote further research in the area.
Drawing on Brown and Fraser’s (in: Giles, Scherer (eds) Social markers in speech, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 33–62, 1979) framework for the analysis of communicative situations and Fuentes Rodríguez’s (Lingüística pragmática y Análisis del discurso, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2000; in Estudios de Lingüística: Investigaciones lingüísticas en el siglo XXI, 2009. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2009.Anexo3.04) model of pragmatic analysis, this paper examines three home-made recordings featuring some of the members of the terrorist cell responsible for the 2017 vehicle-ramming attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils weighted as evidence during the trial held between November 2020 and May 2021 in the Spanish National High Court. The aim of this qualitative analysis is to test whether the linguistic evidence available supports the allegation that the participation in these recordings by one of the accused, Mohamed Houli Chemlal, had been planned by his interlocutors. Results show, first, that the exchanges analyzed present features indicative of both spontaneity and (limited) planification. Second, that Houli makes key contributions to the unfolding of the interactions shown in the recordings and that he does so in a cooperative and apparently relaxed manner, which could at best provide only partial support to his allegations. It is claimed that forensic linguistic analysis can generate valuable insights within terrorism-related legal proceedings.
What constitutes a 'threatening tone of voice'? There is currently little research exploring how listeners infer threat, or the intention to cause harm, from speakers' voices. Here, we investigated the influence of key linguistic variables on these evaluations (Study 1). Results showed a trend for voices perceived to be lower in pitch, particularly those of male speakers, to be evaluated as sounding more threatening and conveying greater intent to harm. We next investigated the evaluation of multimodal stimuli comprising voices and faces varying in perceived dominance (Study 2). Visual information about the speaker's face had a significant effect on threat and intent ratings. In both experiments, we observed a relatively low level of agreement among individual listeners' evaluations, emphasising idiosyncrasy in the ways in which threat and intent-to-harm are perceived. This research provides a basis for the perceptual experience of a 'threatening tone of voice', along with an exploration of vocal and facial cue integration in social evaluation.
Data is a more basic resource for all associations than at any other time in recent memory. Recent advances and models such as sensor platforms, IoT, distributed computing, and information exploration make it possible for the inevitable, skilled, and real collection of information. Information security and protection are essential for information to be used to its full potential. Despite the fact that information security and protection have been mostly considered during the last few years, today it is faced with new and unpleasant problems in information security and protection. Part of these difficulties arises from security concerns about the use of information and from the need to combine security with the use of information for security in applications such as national insurance, counter-terrorism and well-being, food, and water security. Various difficulties arise due to the fact that the organization of a new set of data and processing devices, for example, used in the IoT, increases the information attack surface. This paper reviews the significant ideas and approaches to information security, protection and identifies the research challenges that should be addressed with comprehensive solutions to information security and privacy questions.
Demersul de față examinează comparativ conceptul de amenințare utilizat în domeniul apãrãrii țării și cel al securității naționale prin investigarea instituțiilor și terminologiei legale și politico-administrative, cu scopul de a clarifica conținutul acestora. În acest sens, sunt examinate o serie de surse care beneficiază de universalitate, legitimitate și opozabilitate pentru a susține următoarele argumente: conceptul de amenințare în domeniul apărării țării și cel al securității naționale au sensuri distincte, care determină răspunsuri sociale și instituționale diferite.
In diesem Artikel wird ein Dissertationsprojekt vorgestellt, in dessen Zentrum ein allseits gängiges Konzept steht: der Stil. Meist geht es um gewisse Normen oder Konventionen, die – vor der Schablone der Situation, der Zeit oder der Funktion – in gewissem Maße Werturteile erlauben. Ein Befolgen der Vorschriften bringt zumeist einen ‚guten', d. h. angemessen Stil mit sich, das Brechen mit diesen Regeln jedoch einen ‚schlechten' oder eben gar keinen Stil. Welche Regeln zu befolgen sind, wird zu einem Großteil bereits im Deutschunterricht gelehrt. Was aber, wenn es keine Regeln, keine Konventionen gibt? Dies ist insbesondere bei Texten der Fall, die gesellschaftlich und rechtlich keine Akzeptanz finden – wie es bei Droh- und Schmähbriefen sowie Bekennerschreiben der Fall ist. Drohbriefautor/innen schreiben ihren Text also so, wie sie *meinen*, dass ein Drohbrief auszusehen hat – und dieses Verfahren lässt viel Spielraum für unterschiedliche Einflüsse. Dieses Spannungsverhältnis – zwischen individuellem Sprachgebrauch und dem Befolgen oder auch dem bewussten Verstoß gegen vermutete Konventionen – macht sich die Forensische Stilanalyse zu Nutze.
Erschienen im SPRACHREPORT, herausgegeben vom Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
Illocutionary force indicating devices are something of a neglected topic in visual/multimodal intercultural pragmatics, although a number of scholars have observed that some non-verbal speech-act markers have the characteristic that by employing them in a certain way one can actually accomplish the speech act itself. These not only provide a “catalog” of salient types of visual interactions recognized in a given culture, but also represent the best way into a systematic examination of all the divergent types of performative image. Backed by naturally occurring multimodal data (political cartoons and op-ed illustrations), this article considers the problem of identifying and cataloguing pictorial acts, given some problematic features, such as their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto images. I also address the question of whether pictorial act markers are universal or culturally specific. Finally, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) pictorial illocutionary acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the cognitive context models of the participants (picture makers/viewers). All in all, this research should benefit not only multimodal and intercultural pragmatics, which is still in its infancy, but also work in the speech-act domain, which has been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1970s and 1980s.
This study takes a novel approach to the study of threatening communications by arguing that they can be characterized as a genre – a genre that generally carries strong connotations of intimidation, fear, aggression, power, and coercion. We combine the theoretical framework of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) with results from theoretical and empirical analyses of threats to arrive at a more comprehensive perspective of threats. Since threats do not form part of any regular curriculum of genres, we designed a survey to test how recognizable they are. While scholars on threats describe threatening communications as remarkably varied in form and contextual features, the majority of our respondents categorized test items as threats without prompts of any kind, indicating that threats are a recognizable genre. We propose that threatening communications belong to a wider category of illicit genres: i.e. genres that generally disrupt and upset society and commonly affect their targets negatively. The uptakes of illicit genres are very different from those of other genres, as the users of the genres often actively avoid naming them, making uptake communities significant shapers of illicit genres. The present study contributes to research on threatening communications, since genre theory sheds light on important situational factors affecting the interpretation of a text as a threat – this is a particularly contentious question when it comes to threats that are indirectly phrased. The study also contributes to genre theory by pointing to new territory for genre scholars to examine, namely illicit genres. Studies of illicit genres also have wider, societal benefits as they shed light on different kinds of problematic rhetorical behavior that are generally considered destructive or even dangerous.
This study offers new insights into the complex and underexplored nature of reported threats. Combining the theoretical framework of speech act analysis with the concept of reported speech, the study finds six categories of reported threats, uncovering ones that have been overlooked by existing scholarship thus far. The texts presented are derived from audio-recordings of 847 interviews carried out in four Central American countries: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama between 2010 and 2014. References to threats and threat narratives came from school teachers, community leaders, police officers, clergy, and members of municipal violence prevention committees. The interpretation of indirect and implicit threats are made in the social context of communities under siege, that is, under constant attack by local gangs, many of whom are connected to national gangs and international narcotrafficking cartels. The credibility of the different types of threats is evaluated, using Goffman’s (1981) insight into the complexity of speaker roles in face-to-face interaction. © 2016, International Pragmatics Association. All rights reserved.
It is common knowledge that threats are typically motivated by a desire to strike fear in others. Fear appeals have received much attention in various disciplines over the last six decades and these studies have collectively garnered comprehensive results. Still, several inadequacies remain. One of neglected areas in the field of threatening communication is the lack of research on fear appeal themes in interpersonal communication. Few researchers have addressed the problem of analyzing the content of fear appeal. The paper broadens current knowledge of “threat content—threat response” correlation. To this end, firstly, threats are analyzed from a theoretical perspective to reveal their dimensions and function in communication. Then contents of threatening interactions are analyzed and statistically examined in terms of response efficacy. To this purpose, responses to threats are extracted and subsequently classified in order to find out whether addressees’ responses indicate any tendency about the outcome of an interaction. The implications drawn from this study allow us to consider how appeal to certain types of fear influences the efficiency of threatening messages.
This paper considers the act of verbal threatening. I first examine what constitutes a verbal threat, concluding that it involves conveying both the intention to perform an act that the addressee will view unfavourably and the intention to intimidate the addressee. I then compare threatening to promising and warning, and I examine the ways in which a speaker may issue a threat, given that one can never guarantee success in threatening. Finally, I look at the multitude of factors that must be considered if one is to conclude that a serious threat was made.
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