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Part of
Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics
Edited by István Kecskés and Stavros Assimakopoulos
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 274] 2017
► pp. 75–102

Chapter 4
“Burn the antifa traitors at the stake…”

Transnational political cyber-exchanges, proximisation of emotions

| University of Cyprus
| University of Cyprus

The present contribution examines the use of lingua franca in a transnational computer mediated corpus, focusing on the extreme-right Greek political party Golden Dawn. Our data include the visual identities, pseudonyms and verbal comments of discussants. We investigate the processes through which an emergent common ground is built in this on-line far-right discourse, mainly through co-constructed salient lexical and conceptual units. This salience helps proximise emotions and in particular the notion of a threat which is at the heart of far-right discourse argumentation. We shed light on the discursive strategies put in place on the individual level with a view to creating, perpetuating and strengthening the immanency and closeness of the threat, which allegedly legitimises a particular course of action. When comparing our findings with the results of previous studies focused on other Greek and French data we argue, on the basis of the presence of common features, for the existence of a dedicated lingua franca which could be called (extreme)-right newspeak.

Keywords: cyberdiscourse, emotions, common ground, far-right discourse-proximisation, Golden Dawn
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical considerations
    • 2.1Ideological common ground defining far-right discourse
    • 2.2Salience of lexical units defining axiological values of far-right discourse
    • 2.3Cyber communication context: Proximising a threat
  • 3.Data, typology, methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Methodology
  • 4.Analysis of avatars and pseudonyms
    • 4.1Quantitative results
    • 4.2Proximisation of positive emotions towards the Self
      • 4.2.1Spatial proximisation
      • 4.2.2Temporal proximisation
      • 4.2.3Axiological values
    • 4.3proximisation of negative emotions towards the Other
      • 4.3.1Discrediting the Other
      • 4.3.2Resisting the Other
  • 5.Salience of lexical units and emerging common ground in comments
    • 5.1Sarcasm, hostility and disparaging metaphors
    • 5.2Main salient lexical units
      • 5.2.1The Self
      • 5.2.2The Other
      • 5.2.3The party and its ideology
    • 5.3Battle over salient lexical meanings
    • 5.4Proximising the Threat
  • 6.Proximising values to build a far-right newspeak
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.274.05bai
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