CIDRAL Key Ideas Seminar: Ideologies of Violence: Threatening Language Ideologies vs. Threatening Language Realities: Led by Tammy A. Gales (Hofstra)
| Dates: | 7 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 16:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's Work, Leisure, Culture strand.
Tammy A. Gales (Hofstra University) will lead a CIDRAL Key Ideas Seminar entitled 'Threatening Language Ideologies vs. Threatening Language Realities'.
Over the past two decades, “true crime” television shows have seen a dramatic increase in popularity (Nielsen Ratings, 2016). Studies have documented their effects on how juries assess the value of evidence in criminal cases (e.g., Thomas, 2006), but to-date, little research has been performed on the ways in which such popular shows may be influencing our understanding of criminal language (Gales, 2010; Gales, 2019). In this talk, we will examine how various communities of practice (CoP) – practitioners, researchers, and students training to enter law enforcement or legal-related careers – intuitively view the language of threatening communications. It was found that our ideologies overwhelmingly construct a genre committed to violence and threatener control. Second, through a corpus-based analysis of 470 threatening communications, I outline how grammatical markers of stance, which is an author’s culturally-organized feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments about a recipient or proposition (Biber et al., 1999), are actually distributed in threats, uncovering an unexpected set of interpersonal functions associated with these markers that contradict previous impressions about threatening language. Finally, we will compare two threats in light of these findings – one from an authentic case and one from a “true crime” series. The goal is to offer a more comprehensive understanding of ideologically-constructed vs. authentic threatening language.
Tammy Gales is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment, and Strategic Analysis at Hofstra University, New York. Her primary research uses corpus and discourse analytic methods to examine authorial stance in threatening communications and other forensic contexts. She has trained law enforcement agents from agencies across Canada and the U.S. and applied her work to criminal and civil cases for both prosecution and defense.
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B2.4
Ellen Wilkinson Building
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