The language of “Ribbonmen”: A CDA approach to identity construction in nineteenth-century Irish English threatening notices

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rural midlands of Ireland suffered from agrarian violence and intimidation through threatening notices. In the minds of the authorities, these outrages were committed by members of a secret society, called the "Ribbon

Threatening as a sociocultural–conceptual communicative act

“…From a sociocultural‐conceptual perspective, Rock could be regarded as the outcome of metonymic extension ( instrument for user ) as well as a sociocultural category in its own right, as it involves a categorisation that provides a basic semantic framework in the sociocultural cognition of 19th‐century Irish experiencing agrarian violence in some way (Peters & van Hattum, 2021, p. 61). The occurrence of 176 tokens of the lemma Rock in a corpus of ‘only’ 632 threatening notes collected by van Hattum (2017) as well as the fact that the lemma contributes to 37% of all pseudonyms used in the corpus (Peters & van Hattum, 2021, p. 39) show how widely Rock is shared and how similarly it is encoded socioculturally in the minds of 19th‐century Ireland. Also, it shows how salient sociocultural conceptualisations of Rock such as rock is a social, political and military leader, rock is a friend and defender of the poor, and rock is a mythical figure actually are.…”

“…Example (3) comes from a corpus of 632 threatening letters that were circulated in Ireland between the years 1801 and 1872 and hence represent varieties of Early Modern Irish English. These letters, or notices, bear witness to a period of severe social unrest, characterised by agrarian violence and ‘secret societies’ that waged both verbal and physical war against the ruling Anglo‐Irish/British landlords (Gibbons, 2004; Peters & van Hattum, 2021; van Hattum, 2017). The threat in (3) is clearly verbalized and does not leave much ground for expecting anything other than deathly actions from the (anonymous) threatener.…”

Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices

“…A handful of corpus-based approaches have been produced by researchers such as Gales (2011), Muschalik (2018) and Nini (2017), all of which, however, are based on late 20th-century American English. The only study to date which makes use of a dataset other than American English is Van Hattum (2017), which explores the linguistic expression of identity in late 19th-century Irish English threatening communication. However, none of these studies provided an in-depth analysis of the role pseudonyms play in cognitively framing and culturally conceptualising a threat, leaving unexplored the range of semiotic choices that threateners make when constructing a culturally and socially contextualised persona in order to create the greatest possible threat (cf.…”