Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T07:04:17.705Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Natalia Knoblock
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
Get access

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.

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Assimakopoulos, S. A. (2017). Online Hate Speech in the European Union: A Discourse-Analytic Perspective. Cham: Springer International Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L. (1970). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyżanowski, M., McEnery, T., and Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society, 19(3), 273306. doi:10.1177/0957926508088962.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bangstad, S. (2014). Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia. London: Zed Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, J. M. (2019). The dangerous spread of extremist manifestos. The Atlantic, 26 February. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/christopher-hasson-was-inspired-breivik-manifesto/583567/Google Scholar
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bondi, M., and Scott, M. (2010). Keyness in Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Brindle, A. (2016). The Language of Hate: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of White Supremacist Language. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, P., and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buckingham, L., and Alali, N. (2019). Extreme parallels: A corpus-driven analysis of ISIS and far-right discourse. Kōtuitui, 15(2), 122. doi:10.1080/1177083x.2019.1698623Google Scholar
Cockbain, E., and Tufail, W. (2020). Failing victims, fuelling hate: Challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative. Race and Class, 61(3), 332. doi:10.1177/0306396819895727CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cotti, P. (2015). Deconstructing persecution and betrayal in the discourse of Anders Behring Breivik: A preliminary essay. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96(4), 10411068. doi:10.1111/1745-8315.12309CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ebner, J. (2017). The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Enarsson, T., and Lindgren, S. (2019). Free speech or hate speech? A legal analysis of the discourse about Roma on Twitter. Information and Communications Technology Law, 28(1), 118. doi:10.1080/13600834.2018.1494415CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gee, J. P. (2014). How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit: Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hernandez-Albujar, Y., and Gemignani, M. (2015). Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants: Discourses, narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(15), 27542770.Google Scholar
Joffe, J. (2016). Angela Merkel faces criticism for Germany’s open-door migrant policy. Interview by Linda Wertheimer. NPR. Last modified 24 December.Google Scholar
Khlopotunov, Y. Y. (2020). Hate speech in American political discourse: functional-linguistic analysis. Professional Discourse and Communication, 2(2), 2030. doi:10.24833/2687-0126-2020-2-2-20-30.Google Scholar
Leonard, R. A. (2017). Forensic Linguistics. In Van Hasselt, V. B. and Bourke, M. L. (Eds.), Handbook of Behavioral Criminology (pp. 437449). Cham: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
MacWilliams, M. (2016). The Rise of Trump: Amherst: The Amherst College Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marone, F., and Olimpio, M. (2020). ‘We will conquer your Rome’: Italy and the Vatican in the Islamic State’s propaganda. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 123. doi:10.1080/1057610X.2020.1776952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matamoros-Fernández, A. (2017). Platformed racism: The mediation and circulation of an Australian race-based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Information, Communication and Society, 20(6), 930946.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, D., and Walker, B. (2019). Corpus Stylistics: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennock-Speck, B., and Fuster-Márquez, M. (2014). Imperatives in voice-overs in British TV commercials: ‘Get this, buy that, taste the other’. Discourse and Communication, 8(4), 411426. doi:10.1177/1750481314537578.Google Scholar
Rayson, P., and Garside, R. (1998). The claws web tagger. ICAME Journal, 22, 121123.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In Speech Acts (pp. 59–82). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Strani, K., and Szczepaniak-Kozak, A. (2018). Strategies of othering through discursive practices:Examples from the UK and Poland. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 14(1), 163179. doi:10.1515/lpp-2018-0008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarrant, B. (2019). The Great Replacement. Lulu.comGoogle Scholar
Tufail, W. (2018). Media, state and ‘political correctness’: The racialisation of the Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal. In Bhatia, M, Poynting, S, and Tufail, W (Eds.), Media, Crime and Racism (pp. 4971). Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vine, B. (2004). Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse of Power in Workplace Interaction. Philadelphia, PA; Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waltman, M. S. (2003). Stratagems and heuristics in the recruitment of children into communities of hate: The fabric of our future nightmares. Southern Journal of Communication, 69(1), 2236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, A. (2016). Island retreat: On hate, violence and the murder of Jo Cox. openDemocracy website (20 June).Google Scholar
Yavuz, M. H. (2020). Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism: Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zjakic, H., Han, C., and Liu, X. (2017). ‘Get fit!’: The use of imperatives in Australian English gym advertisements on Facebook. Discourse, Context and Media, 16, 1221. doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2017.01.002.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×