The Language of Violent Jihad

Paul Baker · Rachelle Vessey · Tony McEnery

Oct 2021 · Cambridge University Press

Ebook

243

Pages

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About this ebook

How do violent jihadists use language to try to persuade people to carry out violent acts? This book analyses over two million words of texts produced by violent jihadists to identify and examine the linguistic strategies employed. Taking a mixed methods approach, the authors combine quantitative methods from corpus linguistics, which allows the identification of frequent words and phrases, alongside close reading of texts via discourse analysis. The analysis compares language use across three sets of texts: those which advocate violence, those which take a hostile but non-violent standpoint, and those which take a moderate perspective, identifying the different uses of language associated with different stages of radicalization. The book also discusses how strategies including use of Arabic, romanisation, formal English, quotation, metaphor, dehumanisation and collectivisation are used to create in- and out-groups and justify violence.

About the author

Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He has written 20 books on various aspects of language, discourse and corpus linguistics. He is commissioning editor of the journal Corpora and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Rachelle Vessey is Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). Her research applying corpus linguistics and discourse analysis has been published in a range of international journals and she is the author of Language and Canadian Media (2016).

Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University. He has published widely on corpus linguistics and is the author of Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (with Andrew Hardie, 2011).

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