Project PI: Tanya Karoli Christensen. Project period: 1. January - 31. December 2020. Recent years have seen an increase in threatening messages, not least through social media. Threats are meant to instil fear in their recipients; an effect produced largely by the use of language. While practitioners offer 'threat assessments' to determine the seriousness and intent of threats, basic research on threatening language and the genre of threats remains minimal.