Abstract
Using four tweets by Steven Salaita about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that resulted in the retraction of his academic job offer in September 2014 as our case study, we investigate the role of Twitter in the shaping and reception of the controversial messages. Our analysis combines Gricean pragmatics with im/politeness and hate-speech research to reveal a complex layering of potential meanings stemming from what is linguistically encoded in each tweet. Their construal as hate speech, in particular, depends on which of these potential meanings critics chose to focus upon. We account for this finding by considering the diversity of potential audiences of a tweet and suggest that the effects of context collapse on implicated meanings can be especially detrimental. Competition for attention among incoming tweets, Twitter's central affiliative function and applicable length restrictions can, nevertheless, place a premium on communicating such meanings.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 26-57 |
| Journal | Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Online published | 2 Jul 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).UN SDGs
This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Research Keywords
- Context collapse
- Freedom of speech
- Hate speech
- Implicatures
- Impoliteness
- Language aggression
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