Justifying threats: on the use of first-person pronouns in threatening messages

All verbal threats are phrased and communicated by a sender that may be represented within the threatening message in the form of first-person pronouns (1PPs). Seeking to understand the sender's self-representation in linguistic threats better, we have developed a coding scheme for what we term discourse functions in threatening messages and applied it to utterances containing a 1PP, extracted from a corpus of written, Danish threats. Unsurprisingly, just over half of the 1255 utterances express various types of threatening discourse functions. A less expected finding is the prevalence of justifications for threatening, in which the sender provides reasons for expressing intended harm against the recipient. Based on a social-psychological taxonomy of justifications (Semin and Manstead 1983), we find that revenge and self-protection are the prime reasons for threatening referenced in the justifications in our data. We argue that the discourse function of justification indicates an orientation towards societal norms in acknowledging that the communicative act of threatening demands an explanation. However, since these justifications maintain a right to harm other people, they do not mitigate the transgression inherent in the threat but rather contribute to the frightening effect of threatening messages.