‘Might kill at least fifteen tomorrow’

Abstract Modal auxiliaries (e.g., ‘will’, must’) are a language area of interest to threat assessment professionals as a means for discerning authorial commitment to imagined future violence. Yet, how do modal auxiliaries pattern in authentic threats and how does this compare to the way their use is characterized in the threat assessment literature? This study analyzes modals in fourteen authentic ‘pledges to harm’ — a threat targeting a grammatical 3rd Person (e.g., ‘I will kill him/her/them’). Primary findings include: pledge authors who did not act on their violent ideations nevertheless present themselves as both more capable of and more inclined to violence, especially via frequent use of modal ‘will’. Meanwhile, pledge authors who proceeded to real-world violence use a combination of 1st Person subject + requirement modal + proposal of violence to present themselves as morally compelled to attack (e.g., “I must kill”), a construction which appears nowhere in the non-realized texts.