Ideologies about threatening language from scholarly and practitioner communities of practice reflect a genre replete with stances of violence and threatener control, wherein authorial intent is more strongly attributed to threats possessing characteristics that strengthen a threatener’s role in or commitment to the act (e.g. commitment modals, certainty adverbs) (Gales, 2010). Using the resources of Appraisal analysis (Martin and White, 2005), this article examines the ways in which interpersonal stances, or a speaker or writer’s commitment to or attitudes about a person or proposition (Biber et al., 1999), are manifested and function in a realized threat of violence. The analysis reveals that threateners use myriad rhetorical strategies to convey interpersonal meaning (Martin and Rose, 2003) and take stances that both strengthen and weaken their apparent level of commitment, thus contradicting the one-sidedness of threatening language ideologies and demonstrating the need for further research on stancetaking in threatening discourse.
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