Fit to provoke fear?

Abstract

This article examines what happens when two disparate types of genres collide, here the heterogeneous and illicit genre of threatening communications on the one hand and the fixed and institutional legal genres of legislation, indictments and verdicts on the other. By following the different uptakes (Freadman 1994, 2002) – including the specific types of textual travels (Heffer, Rock and Conley 2013) – of threatening communications into judgments from 50 Danish threat cases, the author both considers how this central piece of language evidence is relayed to the courts and how the overall genre of threats is taken up by the Danish legal system. The findings show that some of the instability of the genre of threats rub off onto the indictments, specifically in their task of relaying the linguistic evidence of oral threats as accurately and transparently as possible. The study concludes that each genre in the legal genre set (Devitt 1991) plays a distinctive role in managing the collision between the heterogeneity of threats and the stringency of the legal system.