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Article published In:
The Discourse of Terrorism
Edited by Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio and Juan L. Castro
[Pragmatics and Society 13:3] 2022
► pp. 404–430

Approaches to the discourse of terror

How power relations are represented through forced primings in jihadist magazines

| University of Granada
| University of Eastern Finland

This chapter presents an investigation into the evidence of fixed language use within jihadist magazines and the extent to which these fixed patterns reflect specific power relations within the text community. The research presents the hypothesis that the writers of articles in jihadist magazines have become primed to employ the words and sets of words through their repeat usage (cf. Hoey 2005, 2017). Thus, lexical and grammatical associations and constructions are analysed to determine the extent to which language use is unique in our corpus. Evidence is presented in the unique way power relationships are linguistically expressed; it is argued here that this reflects the ways in which the writers are primed for their motives or aims of recruitment. Here, a number of words, which are fairly common in news discourse and are in the sematic field of power relations, have been identified as keywords in jihadist magazines. These show the collocation and colligation divergence where they are compared with occurrences in the COCA magazines sub-corpus covering the same time period.

Keywords: discourse analysis, lexical priming, corpus linguistics, power, ideology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
    • 2.1Jihadism, language and ideology
    • 2.2Lexical priming
  • 3.Corpora and methodology
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Introduction
    • 4.2Variations in low-frequency words: Two examples
    • 4.3Establishment and democracy
    • 4.4Oppression
    • 4.5Rule
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21015.pat
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