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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超人还是国土安全？以巴冲突的网络受害者叙事的实用主义特征和争论潜力

本文主要以认知语用学为基础，辅以定位理论的见解，旨在识别网络传播的受害者叙事的语用特征，并突出其论证潜力。本文分析了大约13万用户生成的关于巴以冲突的评论。将框架概念化为关联建立者，启动有倾向性的隐含前提，使用各种语料库语言技术来识别评论者提出的故事情节的框架唤起元素。分析表明，框架可以允许可能影响观众对以色列-巴勒斯坦冲突的认知态度的结论，使特定的受害者叙述看起来更相关和更连贯。特定受害者叙事的论证潜力在于其启动认知和情感效果的能力，从而优化相关性并激活情感程序，使受众在认知上更容易受到操纵。本文为认知语用学如何解释网络公共领域的操纵性政治话语提供了新的见解。本文还论证了语料库语言技术在大型语料库中识别唤起框架元素的有效性。

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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.