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Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 8:1 (2020) ► pp.118–145

Angry tweets

A corpus-assisted study of anger in populist political discourse

ORCID logo | Universidad de Navarra, Spain

The rise of populism has turned researchers’ attention to the importance of affect in politics. This is a corpus-assisted study investigating lexis in the semantic domain of anger and violence in tweets by radical-right campaigner Nigel Farage in comparison with four other prominent British politicians. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of discourse show that Farage cultivates a particular set of affective-discursive practices, which bring anger into the public sphere and offer a channel to redirect frustrations. Rather than expressing his own emotions, he presents anger as generalised throughout society, and then performs the role of defending ‘ordinary people’ who are the victims of the elites. This enables him to legitimise violent emotions and actions by appealing to the need for self-assertion and self-defence.

Keywords: populism, political discourse, emotion, anger, social media
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Affective-discursive practices and emotional regimes
    • 2.1Affect and emotion in discourse
    • 2.2Anger in politics
    • 2.3The social media environment
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Methodological approach
    • 3.2Corpus description
    • 3.3Quantitative analysis
    • 3.4Qualitative analysis
  • 4.Quantitative analysis
    • 4.1Overview of emotion-related lexis
    • 4.2Positive emotion-related lexis
    • 4.3Negative emotion-related lexis
    • 4.4Locus of anger/violence
  • 5.Qualitative analysis
    • 5.1Attacks and attackers
    • 5.2Violence/violent
    • 5.3Anger/angry
    • 5.4Bullies and bullying
    • 5.5Anger/violence and agency
    • 5.6Comparison with other negative emotions: Fear and worry
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Software
Published online: 25 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00033.bre
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Software

Wmatrix4. http://​ucrel​.lancs​.ac​.uk​/wmatrix/

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