Employing Violent Lexical Vocabulary in Contemporary Yemeni Newspapers

Abstract

This study aims to investigate violent lexical vocabulary in contemporary Yemeni newspapers to determine the strategies employed in them, and to reveal their various meanings and uses. The research included an introduction, a preface, and three sections discussing the lexical vocabulary in support of the newspapers of authority, the lexical vocabulary in the opposition newspapers, and the semantic differences in the lexical vocabulary used by both parties. The study revealed the emergence of a violent conflict between the official newspapers under study that express the point of view of the authority on the one hand, and the partisan newspapers that oppose the authority on the other hand. It became clear that the social actors in the study sample possessed harsh vocabulary against their political opponents, whether it belonged to the political, social, economic, or religious lexicon, and this lexicon created direct verbal violence, indirect symbolic violence, and counter-violence. Yemeni newspapers have shown a set of semantic relationships between vocabulary, including dialectical semantic differences in some vocabulary that is biased towards the parties, such as the use of “crisis” and “creative chaos” in the newspapers of the authority, as opposed to “revolution” and “uprising” in the newspapers of the opposition.