Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
- 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 throughThis 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.…
Author details: | Arne PetersORCiDGND, Marije van Hattum |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet |
ISSN: | 0172-8865 |
ISSN: | 1569-9730 |
Title of parent work (English): | English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English |
Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing Co. |
Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2021/01/27 |
Publication year: | 2021 |
Release date: | 2023/11/27 |
Tag: | Irish English; construction; context-specificity; persona; post-positioned semantic frame setters; pseudonyms; sociocultural cognition; threatening communication |
Volume: | 42 |
Issue: | 1 |
Number of pages: | 25 |
First page: | 29 |
Last Page: | 53 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 8 Literatur / 82 Englische, altenglische Literaturen / 820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen |
Peer review: | Referiert |