Abstract This study explores the role of linguistic criteria in the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) reasoning in hate speech cases, alongside broader social, ideological, and contextual factors. It is based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus-assisted examination of 41 judgements, which are systematically assessed against analytical categories derived from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the United Nations Rabat Plan of Action. The findings indicate that the Court’s reasoning follows a consistent quasi-linguistic structure, whereby descriptive legal terminology functionally corresponds to discursive strategies identified in CDA research. The Court’s assessment operates across interrelated analytical levels, encompassing micro-level discursive practices, meso-level social practices, and macro-level ideological frameworks. Linguistic characteristics of the impugned expressions are systematically examined in relation to contextual variables, including socio-political context, speaker intent and status, extent of dissemination, and likelihood of harm. Overall, the findings demonstrate an integrated evaluative model, suggesting that forensic linguistics may provide a methodologically robust basis for enhancing the consistency and transparency of judicial hate speech assessment.
Modal auxiliaries (e.g., 'will', must') are a language area of interest to threat assessment professionals as a means for discerning authorial commitment to imagined future violence. Yet, how do modal auxiliaries pattern in authentic threats and how does this compare to the way their use is characterized in the threat assessment literature? This study analyzes modals in fourteen authentic 'pledges to harm' - a threat targeting a grammatical 3rd Person (e.g., 'I will kill him/her/them'). Primary findings include: pledge authors who did not act on their violent ideations nevertheless present themselves as both more capable of and more inclined to violence, especially via frequent use of modal 'will'. Meanwhile, pledge authors who proceeded to real-world violence use a combination of 1st Person subject + requirement modal + proposal of violence to present themselves as morally compelled to attack (e.g., "I must kill"), a construction which appears nowhere in the non-realized texts.
This article investigates how psychological abuse is discursively enacted through subtle forms of coercion and control in Italian cyberstalking cases. Based on a corpus of 447 messages sent by male perpetrators to female victims across three Italian cases, the study explores how language is mobilized to assert dominance and control. Drawing on Speech Act Theory (Austin [1962] 2018; Searle [1969] 1975) and Pence and Paymar's (1993) "Power and Control Wheel" the analysis combines linguistic and psychological coding to trace communicative patterns ranging from affective appeals to veiled threats and surveillance. The findings show that digital coercion is sustained through recurring verbal strategies that present domination as affection, normalizing psychological abuse as care. By combining forensic linguistics and psychology, the study advances discourse-analytic research on online gender-based violence and proposes a framework for identifying linguistic indicators of coercive control.
This paper examines how violence against women in politics (VAWP) is enacted and normalised in Malaysia through online reactions to a media appearance by Young Syefura Othman, a Malay-Muslim politician in the Chinese-majority Democratic Action Party (DAP). Drawing on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; Esposito and KhosraviNik 2023), it analyses reaction-emoji metrics and 2,800 netizen comments following the recirculation of the clip by Utusan Malaysia Online. The findings identify three interlocking mechanisms of political violence: (1) affective disciplining organised through emoji-driven ridicule; (2) embodied degradation via animalisation and sexualisation that recode political agency as bodily subordination; and (3) moral-religious sanction, in which appeals to haram (religiously forbidden), kafir (infidel), calls for fatwa (religious rulings), and eschatological imagery authorise exclusion from political and religious community. Sexualisation functions as a key intensifier that binds gendered hostility to racialised and religious boundary-work. The paper argues that framing such attacks as mere "online misconduct" obscures their political function in deterring participation, eroding democratic voice, and policing the boundaries of political belonging.
