Joke or threat? Competing genre uptakes in a Danish court case

• Published in: Language and Law 2023, Vol.10 (1), p.30-88
• Main Author: Bojsen-Møller, Marie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Danish language; Forensic linguistics; Genre; Humor; Jokes; Legal language; Linguistics; School violence; Secondary school students; Threats; Verbal aggression
• ISSN: 2183-3745; 2183-3745
• DOI: 10.21747/21833745/lanlaw/10_1/a2

This article examines a Danish criminal case concerning a high school stu-dent who posted a picture on Instagram with the caption ‘I’ll be the nextschool shooter guys, lmao, watch out’ (Danish: jeg bliver den næste schoolshooter guys, lmao, watch out). Reactions to – or uptakes on (Freadman,1994, 2002) – the Instagram post were split between two types; some tookit as a threat and some took it as a joke. Building on theory on threaten-ing communications (e.g. Bojsen-Møller, Auken, Devitt, & Christensen, 2020;Fraser, 1998; Gales, 2019; Solan & Tiersma, 2005), on humor (Billig, 2005;Norrick, 2010; Tsakona, 2017) and on genre theory (Devitt, 2009; Freadman,2012, 2020; Miller, 1984), this article studies the diverging uptakes as they arepresented within the court case through examination of both transcripts ofaudio recordings from the court room and court documents. The findings ofthis study show that while linguistic interpretation is mostly limited to thenetcronym ‘lmao’, other non-linguistic behaviors are often used as justifica-tion for a particular interpretation of the linguistic behavior. Not only theprosecuted utterance itself, but also the utterances’ uptakes, i.e. an essen-tial aspect of its context, have a bearing on the outcome of the case and theassessment of the defendant’s intent. As such, this study offers importantinsight into an area that Gales (2019) argues is in need of further interdisci-plinary research, namely how contextual features can influence the outcomeof criminal cases concerning disputed threats.