ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 also looks at the language around violence but this time looks at how violent crime committed by people with schizophrenia is recontextualised in terms of blame and responsibility. While previous research within critical discourse analysis has tended to view blame as tantamount to grammatical agency (e.g. Dreyfus, 2017), this chapter takes a more nuanced approach, drawing on research emerging in experimental psychology which explores how readers process blame judgements according to specific criteria. Since readers operate according to an intentionality bias (Rosset, 2008), it was deemed necessary that violent crime was recontextualised appropriately according to these criteria. Thus, 100 collocates were examined for the top ten most frequent words referring to violent acts in the dataset. These were then examined closely for those that appealed to the blame criteria in the Path Model pioneered by Malle et al. (2014). The analysis reveals that, while crimes are not contextualised explicitly in terms of blame and responsibility, a number of subtle implicit strategies are employed to hint to readers that individuals were more responsible than the evidence suggested at the time.
