The semantics of terrorism: notional profile of language expression

Олеся ЄГОРОВА, кандидат філологічних наук, доцент кафедри германської філології Сумського державного університету (Суми, Україна)

У наш час тероризм є значною загрозою в глобальних масштабах. У міждисциплінарному вимірі функціонує чима- ла кількість трактувань цього явища, які переважно спираються на розуміння його як умисної дії з метою погрожу- вання та впливу. Утім термін «тероризм» і досі не має єдиного тлумачення, що задовольняло би як окремі правові інститути, так і широкий загал. Окрім того, трактування терміну ускладнюється відсутністю чітких меж впливу тероризму, зокрема через його вторгнення у сферу кіберпростору і виникнення нових підступніших форм тероризму. Неочікувано для всіх нас у 2022 році тероризм став одним з найактуальніших концептів в житті українців.

Ця стаття відкриває серію наукових розвідок з питань концептуалізації, категоризації та вербалізації інформаційного тероризму, що практикується в контексті Російського вторгнення в Україну 2022 року. Як підвид кібертероризму інформаційний тероризм становить значну небезпеку для суспільного добробуту, світової стабільності та сталого розвитку. Ефективна боротьба з тероризмом, на нашу думку, має починатися з усвідомлення громадянським суспільством самої сутності поняття «тероризм». Оскільки лінгвокогнітивістика пояснює концепти реального світу через вивчення їх вербалізованих реконструкцій у мові та дискурсі, вивчення лексичної актуалізації концептів ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM сприятиме глибшому розумінню його сутності.

Концепт з позицій семантико-когнітивного підходу є тришаровим утворенням, в рамках якого вирізняють номінативний (інформативний), образно-асоціативний та інтерпретаційний шари. Ця стаття пропонує ком- паративний аналіз змісту номінативних шарів концептів ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM в українській та англійській мовах. Базові фактуальні ознаки, які містяться в номінативному шарі концепту, є найбільш значущими для спів- віднесення ментальної одиниці з конкретним фактом реальності, а також допомагають розрізняти концепти в межах концептуального поля.

Ключові слова: тероризм, лінгвоконцептологія, концепти ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM, номінативний шар, семантичний множник.

Problem statement

Since 24 February 2022, the unfolding Russia-Ukraine war has called for greater focus on terrorist attacks on Ukraine. The last Terrorism Briefing from The Institute for Economics & Peace has clearly stated that Ukraine is accounted for the second-highest number of attacks since 2007 and is suffering persistent attacks on its territory, with many of them being attributed to Russia (The Ukraine Russia Crisis, 2022). Under President Putin, Russia has been credited as a state using terrorism to attain its political and war goals, thus threatening peace in Ukraine, Europe, and the world.

As of today, Ukraine seeks to recognize Russia as "a state sponsor of terrorism" by other democracies worldwide. Lithuania has become the first - and so far the only country - to designate Russia as a terrorist state; however, the very process of adopting such kind of resolution is impeded by the need for creating a convincing body of evidence, the need for unanimity among the policymakers, and the differences in understanding terrorism itself.

The United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice suggested a simple definition of terrorism, referring to it as “any action [...] that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act” (Terrorism and the Media. A Handbook for Journalists, 207: 20).

Though quite substantial, the definition is not the world-agreed-upon one, with many terminological discrepancies between different legal bodies that prevent from comprehending the nature of terrorism. That along, the technological development and massive use of information have blurred the boundaries of conventional terrorism, transferring it to the cyberspace, and nurturing new kinds of terrorism (information terrorism, hacktivism, cyberterrorism), thus, perplexing the understanding of an important concept of terrorism (Liedel, Piasecka, 2016: 5).

Thus, within the intended complex research project on conceptualizing, categorizing, and verbalizing information terrorism practiced in the context of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, our prime task is to analyze the notional aspect of the concepts ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM resting on the data from authentic lexicographic sources of the Ukrainian and English languages.

State-of-the-art review

Linguistic efforts to analyze terrorism, its linguistic nature, and discourse are considered helpful in enhancing counter-terrorism mechanisms (Shuy, 2020: 446). So, the TERRORISM-concept has been studied in terms of discourse analysis on the material of TED-talks (Almaged, 2021); through textual approach (Miller, 1987); in terms of investigating its grammar actualization only (Etaywe, 2022), or linguistic markers (Johansson et al., 2016). It should be highlighted that there are limited works applying linguocognitive insights to the concept TERRORISM (Zhulavska, 2011; Fatyanova, 2016), and none analyzing the concept of information terrorism that constitutes the prime interest of our research project launched by this particular article.

Objective and tasks

As understanding `terrorism' (prime concept) per se is vital before making attempts to conceptualize and categorize `information terrorism' (derived concept), in this paper, we take a look at the notional foundation. The overall objective of the article is to define the notional core of the ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM-concepts as reflected in Ukrainian and English. Among the tasks are defining the conceptual features pertaining to the notional layer of the concepts, interpreting them, as well as confirming or refuting the propriety of equating the terms terrorism and terror.

Main findings

Within the semantic-cognitive approach, in this study, we apply the methodology already approved in some previous studies (Yehorova, Prokopenko, 2017; Yehorova et al., 2019, etc.) to expose the notional content of the concepts ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM through a set of informative cognitive tokens.

Traditionally, the contents of the notional layer is described by applying the method of lexicographic analysis since the dictionary definitions reflect the nominative experience of the scientific and day-to-day cognition levels (Prykhodko, 2013: 45). We also adhere to the opinion that resorting to dictionaries as information sources is a relevant approach since dictionary glosses hold the imprints of the lexical semantics of language units both in synchrony and in diachrony.

We start to analyze the notional layer of the concepts by interpreting the actual meaning of the core components of the compounds that build up the key nominations of the concepts respectively - тероризм / terrorism. Moreover, already at this point, we should note that in the Ukrainian war discourse of today there is a strong tendency to equate the terms інформаційний тероризм / інфотероризм and інфотерор (Inforteror, 2022), although some researches (Kantsir, 2010; Rapin et al., 2009; Tilly, 2004) have argued such approach. Thus, we also turn to analyzing the notional contents of терор / terror.

As our next step, we address the modern explanatory dictionaries of Ukrainian and English: Словник української мови (Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, SUM) and Великий тлумачний словник сучасної української мови (Large Explanatory Dictionary of the Contemporary Ukrainian Language, VTSSUM), Lexico.com (LEXICO) - a brand new product of collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press (OUP), - Macmillan English Dictionary (MED), and Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD). After studying the corresponding entries, we managed to perform semantic decomposing of lexemes тероризм / terrorism (Tables 1 and 2).

Componential analysis of the concepts' key nominations in distant languages proves the instrumental nature of terrorism: the core conceptual feature `use' is present in the semantic structure of all nominations under analysis. Summing up the obtained data, we are able to state that modern explanatory dictionaries interpret the term terrorism as a [politically (`political') purposeful (`aim') - only in English] mode (`tactics', `means' or `activities')

Table 1

Semantic profile of тероризм / terrorism nominations

Table 2

Semantic convergences of тероризм / terrorism nominations of applying (`use') physical or other kind of force (`violence', `coercion', `terror')

Especially interesting is the fact that 3 of 5 dictionaries, used in this study, explicate the notions тероризм / terrorism by referring to the terms терор / terror which are morphologically the root words of the analyzed above lexemes. Such state of affairs, on the one hand, sheds some light on the reasons why The Center for Countering Disinformation at the NSDC of Ukraine equates the terms інфотероризм (lit. “infoterrorism”) and інфотерор (lit. “infoterror”), and, on the other, makes us turn to interpreting the meaning of the root words терор / terror and perform their componential analysis (see Table 3). At this stage, we refer only to those dictionaries that bear this cross-reference; thus, we exclude LEXICO and MMD from consideration for now.

Before interpreting the results, we have to make some critical notes on the contents of the dictionary entries of Ukrainian. Our fist point of concern: as of 2022, we have to admit the absence of high-quality complete up-to-date explanatory lexicographic works in Ukrainian and their variety as well.

Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (SUM) in 11 volumes that we cite saw the world in 1970-1980. Historically, it became the first explanatory dictionary of Ukrainian. Unfortunately, all modern Ukrainian dictionaries have derived from this fundamental work, which explains the high level of coincidence of the provided interpretations. Luckily, a 20-volume-successor Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, which has been underway since 2010 and already counts 12 volumes as of May 2022 (word spectrum covered: А - ПІДКУРЮВАЧ), seems to be the first indeed completely revised version, primarily in the aspect of “deideologization” of its content.

And here we come across our second point of concern: dictionary definitions offered by both Ukrainian sources used in this study obviously bear that “Soviet tinge” (e.g. “revolutionary movement”, “class opponents”, “the masses”) that we by no means can take into consideration nowadays (these fragments of definition texts were put in square brackets and no semantic summands were derived).

The determined semantic summands that build up the conceptual-informative core of the concepts ТЕРОР / TERROR allow us to construe the corresponding notion: terror is categorized as a strong (`acute', `extreme', `overwhelming') manifestation (`state', `form', `aspect') of violence and coercion towards either political figures (`political', `state leaders', `government') or common people (`civilians', `population') by means of deterrence (`intimidation', `fear', `frightening') and physical elimination (`killing', `destructive', `disruptive').

Table 3

Semantic profile of терор / terror nominations

Table 4

Semantic convergences of терор / terror nominations

Conclusions and prospects for further research

semantics terrorism language expression

Application of componential analysis to the definitional texts of the nominations тероризм / terrorism and терор / terror helped us to specify their semic composition and derive conceptual features that constitute the notional layers of the concepts ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM in a cross-language perspective. Thus, conceptual features `use', `violence', `coercion', and `political' build up the core zone of the notion. The obtained results also support the thesis that both terms refer to the common denotatum - politically motivated use of violence. This allows us to consider rightful the use of terms інфотероризм (lit. “infoterrorism”) and інфотерор (lit. “infoterror”) as equivalents.

At the same time, the presence of the outdated semes in the semantic composition of the concepts' key nominations and the fact that terrorism as phenomenon of reality is being shaped by the actual state of affairs, by the immediate environment and multiple discourses call upon further study. In particular, our future research will be focused on the issues of conceptualizing, categorizing, and verbalizing information terrorism.

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REFERENCES

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2. Etaywe A. Exploring the grammar of othering and antagonisms enacted in terrorist discourse: verbal aggression in service of radicalization. Humanities and Social Sciences Communication, 2022. Vol. 9:177. pp. 1-12.

3. Fatyanova I. V. Nominative space of microsphere of concepts of terrorism in the modern anglo-american political discourse. Philology. 2016. Vol. 5, No. 5. pp. 71-77.

4. Johansson F., Kaati L., Sahlgren M. Detecting Linguistic Markers of Violent Extremism in Online Environments. Artificial Intelligence. 2016. pp. 374-390.

5. Lexico.com. Oxford University Press. URL: https://www.lexico.com.

6. Liedel K., Piasecka P. Cyberspace - the 5th Battlefield. Diagnosis and Recommendations. 2016. 20 p.

7. Macmillan English Dictionary. URL: https://www.macmillandictionary.com.

8. Mader H. M., Micewski E. R., Wiese A. B. Terror und Terrorismus: Grundsдtzliches; Geschichtliches; Reflexionen und Perspektivenstudien und Berichte. Schriftenreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie. Wien, 2001. 40 p.

9. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. URL: https://www.merriam-webster.com.

10. Miller B. H. Terrorism and Language - A Text-Based Analysis of the German Case. Terrorism. 1987. Vol. 9 (4). pp. 373-407.

11. Rapin A.-J. Does terrorism create terror? Critical Studies on Terrorism. 2009. Vol. 2:2. pp. 165-179.

12. Shuy R. Terrorism and forensic linguistics: Linguistics in terrorism cases. The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics / Ed. M. Coulthardand, A. May, R. Sousa-Silva. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2020. pp. 445-462.

13. Terrorism and the Media. A Handbook for Journalists. UNESCO, 2017. 110 p.

14. The Ukraine Russia Crisis: Terrorism Briefing, Sydney, March 2022. Institute for Economics & Peace. URL: https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Ukraine-Russia-Crisis-Terrorism-Briefing-1.pdf.

15. Yehorova O., Prokopenko A. A cross-language perspective on the MAIDAN-concept. ExELL (Explorations in English Language and Linguistics). 2017. Volume 5(2). pp. 71-94.

16. Yehorova O., Prokopenko A., Popova O. The Concept of European Integration in the EU-Ukraine Perspective: Notional and Interpretative Aspects of Language Expression. Modelling the New Europe. 2019. Vol. 29. pp. 57-77.

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