Pre-publication draft Reference: Lorenzo-Dus, N. & Di Cristofaro, M. (2018) 'I know this whole market is based on the trust you put in me and I don't take that lightly': Trust, Community and Discourse in Crypto-drug Markets, Discourse & Communication, pp 1-19 Abstract 'I know this whole market is based on the trust you put in me and I don't take that lightly': Trust, Community and Discourse in Crypto-drug Markets This study uses a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies methodology to provide the first systematic analysis of how trust is discursively constructed in crypto-drug markets. The data come from two purpose-built corpora. One comprises all the forum messages posted on the flag-ship crypto-drug market Silk Road during the years in which it traded on the hidden-net (c. 250 million words). The other corpus comprises all the reports published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) during the same period (c. 153 thousand words). Our analysis of trust focuses on the identities of those buying and selling drugs. The findings reveal that the Silk Road community members (i) regularly discussed vendors' identities alongside a continuum of trust-risk calculation, explicitly identifying both 'good' and 'bad' practice and hence engaging in self-regulatory discourse practices; and (ii) mainly constructed drug users' identities in relation to values of expertise, integrity and benevolence. The findings also suggest that hard law enforcement activity, such as crypto-drug market closure, may encourage technological innovation within these markets.. Moreover, our results show a disconnect between the discursive reality of the policy-making documents we examined and the very crypto-drug markets that they seek to legislate.

Grooming of children online is a legally punishable form of child sexual abuse. In the UK, for instance, the Serious Crime Act has since 2015 made it a criminal offence for an adult to send a sexual message to a child. 1 Nevertheless, this offence is on the increase. The UK-based charity NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), for example, reports a 16.8% growth in policerecorded cases of online child sexual grooming in England and Wales from 2015/16 to 2016/2017 (Bentley et al., 2018, p. 19). Moreover, these figures underestimate the real scale of the issue, which is known to be significantly under-reported by their victims because of a variety of reasons. These include the inability in some cases to realise for some time that they are being abused online, believing instead that they have a friendship-based and/or romantic relationship with their online groomers (e.g., Davidson and Gottschalk, 2011; NSPCC, 2018 2). The seriousness of the offence and its increasing prevalence over time may account for a growing body of academic scholarship investigating online child sexual grooming over the past decade or so. This scholarship has been primarily conducted within the disciplines of Criminology, Psychology and, to a lesser extent, Computational (primarily, Machine Learning) Text Analysis (See Section 2). In contrast, Linguistics scholarship into online child sexual grooming is still "in its infancy" (Chiang and Grant, 2018, p. 2). This is sadly ironic given that online child sexual grooming is an internet-enabled communicative 1

Entrenchment (i.e. Langacker 1987) does not necessarily lead to predictable behaviour. This study aims at complementing the usage-based model of language change by operationalising the role of dialogic creativity as a mechanism that can be in competition with conventionalization and grammaticalization. We provide a distinctive collexeme analysis (i.e. Hilpert 2006) focusing on the constructionalization of the dialogic pair [A: good morrow B-B: (good) morrow (A)] from the 15th up to the 18th century. After reaching the highest degree of entrenchment and automatisation, the dialogic pair will show an increasing tendency to be creatively remodelled with ad-hoc meanings during online exchanges by means of dynamic resonance (Du Bois 2014) and non-reciprocal behaviour. We define this creative process of large-scale alteration as entrenchment inhibition. From our data it will emerge that entrenchment inhibition is triggered by spontaneous attempts of producing a creative 'surplus' over the expected social reciprocity (Gouldner 1960) of conventionalized exchanges. This tendency will be shown to be driven by marked attempts of polite and impolite behaviour.

There has been a major cultural shift away from 'passive' consumption to more active production of digital texts by citizens. Yet, this does not mean that we all participate in digital media in the same ways and for the same reasons. Nor does it mean that we all have the same level of access to digital networks. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the diversity and fluidity of citizen participation in digital environments by examining the discourse style of a particular group of digital users, namely citizens whose contributions become crowdsourced to prominence in microblogging. We refer to this form of citizen participation as 'influential', in as much as the discourse of these citizens attracts inordinate levels of attention and can trigger social contagion. We conduct a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of a corpus of tweets posted by a group of citizens who emerge as 'influential' within a Twitter debate about the minimum / living wage. Our analysis reveals that their discourse style is characterised by (i) limited content originality but a high participation rate; (ii) a continuum of thematic engagement; (iii) high levels of emotionality; and (iv) a preference towards stance-taking acts that convey full confidence in one's views.