رسائل الانتحار على مواقع الأنترنت: تحليل الخطاب

Suicide Notes on Online Websites: Discourse Analysis

Abstract
The current study investigates some selected genuine suicide notes, using the Appraisal System as a comprehensive framework. As the previous studies on suicide notes were mainly concerned with distinguishing genuine from faked notes and examining these notes psychologically viewpoint and the mental representations may differ linguistically according to different circumstantial, mental, and psychological states of suicidal persons, it has been found that there is no discourse analysis conducted to investigate suicide notes linguistically.
Accordingly, this study attempts to bridge this gap by specifying the appraisal systems used to represent suicidal persons’ mental and emotional statements. It aims to recognising the emotional motives of suicide and at identifying the appraisal systems and subsystems, such as attitude, engagement, and graduation that could represent the emotional states in the suicide notes.
Consequently, five hypotheses are set out. First, the feelings of anger due to dissatisfaction and insecurity are the most dominant emotional motives that motivate suicidal people to end their lives. Second, affect are the most frequent subsystems of attitude used in the selected suicide notes. Third, heteroglossic dialogic position is the dominant representative of the engagement subsystem. Heteroglossic dialogic position is used to show the objective and rejective dialogic positions of suicidal people. Fourth, both upscaling and downscaling graduation subsystems are used to manifest different degrees of intensity. Fifth, the appraisal system is significant in disclosing emotional states and how suicidal people view the world.
To verify these hypotheses, the study adopts Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal System to analyse 16 suicide notes in a qualitatively driven method supported by a quantitative analysis.
Some conclusions are drawn depending on the results of the analysis. One of such conclusions is that unhappiness and insecurity are the apparent emotional motives behind people to commit suicide. It has also been found that upscaled ‘affect’ sourcing from a monoglossic dialogic position is the dominant category that realises the attitude; furthermore, the appraisal system, with its three subsystems, is of remarkable comprehensiveness in representing the inner feelings, conflicts, and desires of suicidal people.
The study ends with some recommendations and suggestions for further studies.