We Shall Be Watching You, You're Going to Die, and Other Threats: A Corpus-Based Speech Act Approach
Document Type
Article
Abstract
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. 1st person nominative pronouns occur as subjects of clauses much more frequently than 2nd person pronouns in both the terrorist and non-terrorist threat data. Non-terrorist threats, however, make significantly more use of the 1st person singular nominative pronoun, while terrorist threats use the 1st person plural nominative pronoun more frequently.
Disciplines
Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Publication Date
11-17-2010
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Carter, Natalie Raun, "We Shall Be Watching You, You're Going to Die, and Other Threats: A Corpus-Based Speech Act Approach" (2010). UTA Working Papers in Linguistics. 19.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_workingpapers/19