Threatening in English

Abstract

Threatening is among the less pleasant “things we do with words”, but, together with other conflictive speech acts, it seems to play a central role in communication. Yet, little is still known about how and when exactly speakers threaten. The present volume addresses this void by giving an in-depth analysis of the form and function of this speech act. A set of authentic threat utterances is used to probe questions on the linguistic repertoire employed and the different objectives speakers pursue with their threats. Based on the central findings, a classification of two types of threats is proposed, each with distinctive formal and functional properties. The analysis employs a mixed method approach with a two-fold aim; by combining a qualitative discussion of examples with the application of innovative statistical methodology, the findings allow new insights into research on threats and, simultaneously, offer new perspectives on general research methodology.

Linguistica Silesiana

“…The largest truly empirical study of the association between the conditional and the speech act of threatening was conducted by Muschalik (2018), who examined a corpus of authentic American English threat utterances obtained from naturally occurring speech and writing. Muschalik (2018: 172) shares Gales's view on the superior status of conditionality in threats only to a limited extent as she claims that in her analysis, conditionality "did not reach the status of a conventional component of threatening language in general" if measured in terms of its frequency, but "when the relevance of a feature is to be understood as the feature's discriminatory power, the prominent mentioning of the feature (i.e.…”

“…Our classification model makes use of a feature-assignment scheme, in which all tokens were marked up for the presence or absence of several features discussed below. To ensure the comparability of our results with the results achieved in Muschalik (2018), we included as many parameters employed in her analysis as possible and rejected those for which the presence/absence value predictably followed from the syntax and morphology of IoDs. In addition, new parameters were proposed.…”

“…Futurity has often been indicated as a salient linguistic feature of threats (Yamanaka 1995;Fraser 1998;Gales 2010;Salgueiro 2010: Muschalik, 2018, Bojsen-Møller et al 2020, often being indicative also of the speaker's intention. For Salgueiro (2010: 2-7), futurity is an indispensable element since being commissive speech acts "both elementary promises and elementary threats must describe a future action or omission, or a sequence of such actions or omissions, by the speaker."…”

“…In the present paper, we understand FUTURITY as a reference to a future action (or its omission) performed by an agent or the affected. Muschalik (2018) proposes a quadripartite system of classification of temporal orientation of the act of threatening, i.e. will-futurity, be going to-futurity, present futurate, and finally, no futurity, which in broad terms can be reduced to the opposition futurity vs. no futurity.…”

“…By concentrating on a specific syntactic construction associated with the act of threatening, i.e. pseudo--imperatives or Imperative-or-Declarative (henceforth IoD) structures, we intend to find out to what extent the constructions match the general multifactorial model proposed by Muschalik (2018). Second, by including data derived from written narratives in prose, imaginary rather than factual, this research aims to identify potential differences between fictional and authentic threats.…”