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Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
(2021)
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.
Language portraits are useful instruments to elicit speakers' reflections on the languages in their repertoires. In this study, we implement a "portrait-corpus approach" (Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy 2020) to investigate the conceptualisations of the languages Afrikaans and English in 105 language portraits. In this approach, we use participants' reflections about their placement of the two languages on a human silhouette as a linguistic corpus. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analyses using WordSmith, Statistica and Atlas.ti, our study shows that Afrikaans is mainly conceptualised as a language that is located in more peripheral areas of the body (for example, the hands and feet) and, hence, is perceived as less important in participants' repertoires. The central location of English in the head reveals its status as an important language in the participants' multilingual repertoires. We argue that these conceptualisations of Afrikaans and English provide additional insight into the attitudes towards these languages in South Africa.