[Corpora-List] Corpus of threats?

Tue Nov 6 14:05:06 UTC 2012

This talk is THIS FRIDAY at Georgetown University in Washington DC:

Friday, Nov 9, 3:30-5 in Poulton 230 - TAMMY GALES of Hofstra University

 Interpersonal Stancetaking in Threatening Discourse: A Corpus and
Discourse Analytic Approach

 Abstract

*If you change the hours of service on*

*January 4,2004 I will turn D.C. into a ghost town*

*The powder on the letter is RICIN*

*have a nice day*

* *

*Fallen Angel*

This authentic threat asserts impending fatal injury. Because of the
dangerous nature of threats, investigators must immediately ask: Is the
intent real or a prank? Is it urgent? Is the threatener likely to act? With
real lives on the line, using the linguistic information available to
answer these questions in a timely and accurate manner is of great
importance. Yet, because most scholarship aimed at revealing seriousness of
intent and levels of danger has been based on behavioral characteristics,
there is still a substantial lack of understanding of the discursive nature
of threatening language and a lack of agreement, even, as to how
threateners successfully threaten.

For this research, I created a corpus of 470 threat letters, collected over
a period of one year at the Academy Group, a private behavioral analysis
firm of former F.B.I. Supervisory Special Agents in Washington DC.
Approaching these threats through the construct of ‘stance,’ which is
an author’s culturally-organized feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or
assessments about a recipient or proposition (Biber et al., 1999), I
utilize a triangulation of methods to uncover patterns of epistemic and
affective meaning within the genre.

First, through a survey of threatening language ideologies, I synthesize
how various communities of practice (CoP) intuitively view stance in
threats; our ideologies overwhelmingly construct a genre committed to
violence and threatener control. Second, through a corpus-based analysis, I
outline how grammatical markers of stance are actually distributed,
uncovering an unexpected set of interpersonal functions associated with
these markers—functions that ultimately weaken the stance of the
threatener. This finding is contradictory to impressions about threatening
language from the three CoP, which focus, rather, on functions
that strengthen the threatener’s stance. Finally, I present the discourse
analytic findings from two threat cases; one of which conforms to and
enhances the form-based functions previously identified, while the other
challenges these findings, demonstrating how language, when viewed from a
functional perspective rather than from one strictly based on patterns of
form, can reveal additional ways in which interpersonal meaning is conveyed
in this socially-deviant genre. Ultimately, this multifaceted approach
offers a more comprehensive understanding of the theoretical construct of
stance and the performative nature of threatening.

Bio

Tammy Gales received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of
California, Davis and is currently an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at
Hofstra University. Her current research interests integrate corpus
analysis and various forms of discourse analysis, especially Appraisal, to
address topics of language and the law as they pertain to diversity in the
U.S., to investigate forensic linguistic questions concerning the nature of
threatening communications in contemporary American society, and to reveal
language ideologies about the discourses within each genre.

______________
craig.pfeifer at gmail.com

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Mcenery, Tony <a.mcenery at lancaster.ac.uk>wrote:

>  Dear Tyler,
>
>
>
> written threats would be fairly easy to gather - blood curdling threats
> from terrorist groups, for example. However, if your interest is in spoken
> communication then there is much less available - or at least much less
> available where the density of the appearance fo threats makes the source
> of data useful. An obvious source of data with a good probability of a high
> density of threats (or at least reports of threats) would be police and
> court records, but in the modern era these are difficult to access, for
> obvious reasons. If you looked through something like the Old Bailey
> online, however, you could probably find plenty of reports of threatening
> language in the context of the court records.
>
>
>
> I think that language and violence/threat is a a good area to look at -
> the relationship of language to violence is often overlooked or is looked
> at simply in terms of violent lexis. I think that the pragmatics of threats
> and incitement to violence is a lot more subtle and powerful than a simple
> study of 'threatening language' would suggest. Best,
>
>
>
> Tony
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] on behalf of
> Tyler Schnoebelen [tylerschnoebelen at hotmail.com]
> *Sent:* 01 November 2012 16:59
> *To:* Corpora at uib.no
> *Subject:* [Corpora-List] Corpus of threats?
>
>   I was looking over the records of searches that led to my corpus blog (
> http://corplinguistics.wordpress.com) and came across:
>
>
>
> “death threat corpus linguistics”
>
>
>
> This actually is a pretty interesting idea for a corpus. Does anyone know
> about such a corpus or something similar that would help researchers
> investigate the language of threatening/intimidation?
>
>
>
> Vaguely law/criminal-related corpora suggestions are also welcomed. As
> would “flame war” corpora.
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> Tyler
>
>
>
> Tyler Schnoebelen
>
> http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers
>
> http://corplinguistics.wordpress.com
>
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