Abstract
Since at least as far back as the infamous Derek Bentley case of the 1950s in which an unarmed 19-year-old was convicted and executed for murder based on his alleged uttering of the words let him have it to his gun-wielding accomplice, the issue of incitement has been positioned firmly as an object of interest for forensic linguists. An example of a language crime—i.e. an unlawful speech act (as reported by Shuy in Language crimes: The use and abuse of language evidence in the courtroom, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, 1993) the features of incitement—formalized as intentionally encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence in the law of England & Wales under section 44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/27/contents)—have been widely debated by linguists and legal scholars alike. This paper draws on two webinars hosted by The Hunting Office in August 2020, which were subsequently leaked by the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Featuring senior figures from the hunting community addressing a nationwide audience of hunt masters, the webinars led to a police investigation and subsequent prosecution and conviction of one of the main speakers, Mark Hankinson, for encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence under the Hunting Act 2004. In this paper I explore what, linguistically, is meant by encouraging or assisting. Through corpus-assisted pragmatic and discourse analyses I interrogate the webinars to address the question of how precisely Hankinson implied his encouragement of illegal hunting with dogs. The phenomena of collocation and semantic prosody are crucial for understanding how such meanings came to be attached to the contributions Hankinson makes to the webinars. Moreover the paper will examine the contributions of other speakers and demonstrate that the same incriminating linguistic patterns in Hankinson’s talk are also evident in that of those who were not prosecuted.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 677–694 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | International Journal for the Semiotics of Law |
| Volume | 37 |
| Early online date | 14 Sept 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Keywords
- Collocation
- Encouraging or assisting
- Incitement
- Intent
- Language crime
- Semantic prosody