The Semantics of Terrorist Incitement as Evidence: A Corpus-Assisted Forensic Stance Analysis

This paper advances forensic linguistic inquiry into terrorism by analysing incitement semantics as a power-laden act of ‘persuasion’ (Wilson, 2017) and ‘encouragement’ (U.K. Terrorism Act, 2006). Integrating SFL-based stance analysis (Martin & White, 2005) with Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) (Baker et al., 2021), it examines how language persuades, constructs ideology, and enacts ‘(dis)affiliation’ (Etaywe & Zappavigna, 2024; Etaywe & Giles, 2025). The analysis focuses on The Great Replacement manifesto, deemed objectionable and designed to incite violence by New Zealand authorities. Using the BEO6 corpus as reference, the study examines keywords denoting key social actors (e.g., immigrants), followed by concordance analysis of their semantic roles and grammatical relations (effective vs. middle clauses), agency, and discursive prosody – complemented by ‘gramrels’ and collocation analyses. It then analyses key Appraisal resources – Attitude and Graduation – to show how evaluation, emotion, and intensity are linguistically encoded in incitement messages. Findings reveal evidence of the incited-against, the incitees, and the ideological grounds for violence. For instance, immigrants appear as primary animate participants and antagonists, typically occupying actor roles in clauses such as ”immigrants will destroy us.” These constructions assign agency and embed moral blame, with strongly negative prosody in collocates like ‘destroy,’ ‘invaders,’ and ‘despised.’ Such patterns intensify ideological polarity, legitimise retaliatory violence, and reproduce conspiratorial racialisation and moral panic tropes. The evaluative framing primes audiences to view immigrants as existential enemies, offering pseudo-rational justifications for violence. Concordance line and n-gram analyses of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation show how they intertwine to fuse emotion with moral legitimation of violence while revealing ideological framing that defines what is condemned. Graduation resources indicate density and commitment to violence, with choices like ‘all’ and ‘any’ universalising obligation and erasing moderation, framing annihilation as inevitable and morally unrestrained. The paper offers a robust tool for counter-terrorism applications.