Superman or Homelander? The pragmatic features and argumentative potential of online victimhood narratives of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.013

Thulfiqar Hussein Altahmazi , Raith Zeher Abid

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Abstract

Drawing mainly on cognitive pragmatics, supplemented by insights from positioning theory, the paper aims to identify the pragmatic features and highlight the argumentative potential of the victimhood narratives propagated online. The paper analyzes a corpus of approximately 130,000 user-generated comments discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conceptualizing frames as relevance establishers priming tendentious implicated premises, various corpus linguistic techniques are used to identify the frame-evoking elements of the storyline advanced by commenters. The analysis shows that frames can license conclusions potentially influencing the audience's epistemic attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making a particular victimhood narrative looks more relevant and more coherent. The argumentative potential of a given victimhood narrative lies in its ability to prime cognitive and affective effects that optimize relevance and activate emotional procedures making the audience more epistemically vulnerable to manipulation. The paper provides fresh insights as to how cognitive pragmatics can account for manipulative political discourse in online public sphere. The paper also demonstrates the efficacy of corpus linguistic techniques in identifying frame-evoking elements in large corpora.

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.