TY  - JOUR
A1  - Peters, Arne
A1  - van Hattum, Marije
T1  - Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
JF  - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English
N2  - This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.
KW  - pseudonyms
KW  - threatening communication
KW  - Irish English
KW  - persona
KW  - construction
KW  - sociocultural cognition
KW  - context-specificity
KW  - post-positioned semantic frame setters
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet
SN  - 0172-8865
SN  - 1569-9730
VL  - 42
IS  - 1
SP  - 29
EP  - 53
PB  - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -