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What role do you and I play in threats?
Gyldensteensvej 2, 5400 Bogense
Danish
Lecture by Tanya Karoli Christensen, Professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen and Marie Herget Christensen, Associate Professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen.
Although it is socially unacceptable to threaten others with violence or other harm, threats occur in all social strata. Prison officers, social workers, politicians and scientists are threatened because of their work, but people can also be threatened because of their religion, their disability or conflicts with their neighbour or a former partner. The person who threatens, therefore, rarely chooses a random person as a victim.
The relationship between the sender and the receiver takes its toll in the language. Based on a corpus of 580 authentic written threat messages in Danish, we can see that pronouns in the first and second person are overused compared to traditional written language genres. In this talk, we talk about two detailed studies of how the 1st and 2nd person are used in Danish threat messages. Although the two studies used different coding principles, they both show that one of the most frequent functions of the material is to justify the threat. In other words, the senders provide explanations as to why it should be reasonable to threaten their recipients with harm. The need to justify one's linguistic behavior shows a focus on social norms that can surprise in the context of threats. At the same time, the type of justifications shows that these are skewed norms and thus contribute to the overall effect of the threat message as a deterrent.
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