Approaches to the discourse of terror: How power relations are represented through forced primings in jihadist magazines

Abstract

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 keywords that indicate power relations yet are fairly common in news discourse are compared to show the collocation and colligation divergence where jihadist magazines are compared with occurrences in the COCA magazines sub-corpus covering the same time period.