The language of threats

Abstract

Whether or not a message is a threat will usually depend upon several factors , such as the intent of the speaker, the understanding of the hearer, and the context of the utterance. This paper examines how the language and the context combine to determine the degree of threat and the degree of lawfulness or otherwise in an utterance. However, because the interaction of language and context is inherently and ultimately unpredictable, it is surprisingly - if not impossibly - difficult to construct a context-independent definition of ' threat'.