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11 - ‘Kill the Invaders’

Imperative Verbs and their Grammatical Patients in Tarrant’s The Great Replacement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Robert Bianchi
Edited by
Natalia Knoblock
Natalia Knoblock
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
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Summary

Access to hate speech has been greatly facilitated by the rise and spread of social media. This chapter examines one clear case of this in the 74–page manifesto entitled, The Great Replacement, posted on Facebook by Brent Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter. This chapter explores how violence-related imperative verbs are used to incite harmful acts against perceived enemies throughout the manifesto. Theoretically, the chapter is grounded in the quantitative cum qualitative tradition of corpus stylistics, whereby lexical frequency patterns are calculated by corpus software and then hand-checked. Methodologically, the study relied on UCREL’s CLAWS7 and WordSmith 6 corpus software to identify and examine violence-related lexis. Three imperative verbs were identified: KILL, DESTROY, and RAGE. Concordances of these verbs were generated and compared to their counterparts in the BNC. The results indicated that, in contrast to the BNC where these verbs were generally used in metaphorical and non-violent ways, the author of the manifesto deployed these verbs in concrete ways in order to incite actual acts of violence against immigrants, economic, and specific political elites. The chapter highlights how these imperatives are used by the author to attempt to position himself as a de facto leader of an envisioned violent, anti-establishment white supremacist movement.

Keywords

corpus linguisticsdiscourse analysiswhite supremacyhate speechimperative verbs
Type
Chapter
Information
The Grammar of Hate
Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse
 , pp. 222 - 240
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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