Article published In:
Journal of Language and PoliticsVol. 18:6 (2019) ► pp.893–914
Weaponizing words
Rhetorical tactics of radicalization in Western and Arabic countries
This paper draws on Pratt’s (2009) description of the key linguistic
operations in war-making: exhortation, offense, deception and mediation. The study postulates that ISIS enacts the four operations
in the radicalization of Muslims in Arabic and Western countries. Using FrameNet, the four concepts are mapped to four frames:
Attempt_suasion, Cause_emotion, Intentional_deception and Translating. Frame-based analysis
of a comparable corpus representing bilingual publications of ISIS is carried out to explore these operations. Corpus tools
complemented the analysis with detecting contrastive rhetorical tactics and chronological changes ISIS imposes to radicalize
followers. Findings highlight the destructive effect of transliterated words in the English corpus and refer to the significance
of exhortation in the studied Arabic corpus.
Keywords: weaponizing words, radicalization, rhetorical tactics, ISIS, language of war
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Experiential knowledge in FrameNet
- 2.1Identifying frames through lexical units
- 2.2Selecting frame elements through lexical units
- 3.Hypotheses of the study
- 4.Methodology
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
-
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