A threat is defined by Hornby (2000) as a declaration of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone in retribution for something done or undone. Adams (1985) states that threats are intentional speech acts as they express the speaker’s intentions and can be performed by the speaker alone, ‘I’, or by the speaker as a member of a group ‘we’.
In Searle’s (1975) standard classification, threats appear in the general category of commissives as the speaker commits himself to a future course of action. According to Walton (2014) there are four speech act conditions that have to be met while threatening:
– Propositional Condition
There should be reasons for the listener to believe that the speaker has the ability to bring about the negative outcomes in question.
-Preparatory Condition
It is presumed by both the speaker and hearer that the negative consequences will not occur without the intervention of the speaker.
– Sincerity Condition
These bad actions will not be in the hearer’s interests and the hearer would want to evade them if he can.
– Essential Condition
The speaker makes a commitment to make the bad consequences occur unless the hearer complies with the speaker’s demand.
To conclude, a threat is a declaration of intent to inflict harm, damage, or other hostile actions in response to another’s actions or inactions. There should be certain conditions to decide that a particular speech act is considered a threat. These conditions ensure thata threat functions as a deliberate and coercive communicative act.
References
Adams, J. (1985). Pragmatics and fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Hornby, A. S. (1968). A guide to patterns and usage in English. London: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J.R. (1975) A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Walton, D. (2014). Speech acts and indirect threats in ad baculum arguments: A reply to Budzynska and Witek. Argumentation, 28(3), 317–324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-014-9318-2
