Pragmatics and Society - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020

Even though there seem to be no objectively defined criteria about what constitutes hate speech, a lot of legislation and policy making currently aims at combating it. This paper sets out to define hate speech under its standard legal understanding of ‘incitement to discriminatory hatred’, by adopting a speech-act theoretic perspective. My main proposal is that the Austinian distinction between illocution and perlocution can be pivotal in this process, since hate speech may be an illocutionary act that is typically tied to the recognition of a speaker’s intention to incite discriminatory hatred, but one which can only be defined if one takes into account its speaker’s intended perlocutionary effects; that is, the intention of the speaker to trigger a particular kind of response from some audience. Against this backdrop, I turn to show how a reworked Searlean notion of felicity conditions can be usefully applied in the delineation of hate speech under this legal conception.

This article argues for a definition of online hate speech as a contextualised speech act that is part of a social process of alienation. It suggests that hate speech comes in degrees, is contextual, involves already existing power dynamics, and ‘others’ its targets by creating in/out groups. I first review the various stances towards understanding the phenomenon of online hate speech, including approaches that focus on online hate speech as an interaction shaped by its medium, while also emphasizing the need to consider the role of implicatures in speech acts when defining hate speech. Second, I argue that the relationality of online speech implies that any message is embedded in idiosyncratic socio-cultural norms, and that therefore a ‘one size fits all’ definition of hate speech is elusive. I conclude by suggesting that contextualized hate speech is embedded in a social process of alienation and should be understood as a continuum.

The semantics of slur terms has provoked some debate within the philosophy of language, and different analysis models have been proposed to account for the complex meaning of these terms. The present paper acknowledges the complexity of the matter and presents an analysis model that is inspired by multiple-component approaches to slurs, such as those by Camp (2018) and Jeshion (2018). The Multi-Component Model for the semantic analysis of slurs (MCM) tracks down altogether four meaning components in group-based slur terms: a referential and a pejorative meaning component (being xy and despicable because of it), as well as a scalar component capturing the term’s individual degree of offensiveness, and an expressive component indexing heightened emotions in all contexts of use. The notion of individual offensiveness degrees (that are fed by a multitude of semantic, pragmatic, and/or extralinguistic sources) allows us to account for the differences between slurs for the same ethnic group (such as nigger, negro, coon, darkie for Blacks); and the separation of the expressive component from the pejorative component can (1) explain the high frequency of non-pejorative uses, and (2) correctly describe these uses as expressive.

Using data from readers’ comments to news articles from a national Danish newspaper, the article addresses the nature and function of hyperlinks as evidential practice in relation to xenophobic hate speech. Hyperlinks refer to the use of URL addresses to link to websites; hate speech is understood broadly as stigmatising discourse. Adopting a discursive approach to evidentiality that accounts for a range of phenomena including source of knowledge, participant roles, epistemic stance and interactional force, hate speech related hyperlinks and their evidential functions were identified. While not prevalent in number, hyperlinks serve to legitimise negative stances towards minority groups but also support counter speech targeting prejudicial views. Links can be used as part of processes of metaphorical shift and sarcasm as well as to provoke hate speech in comment threads. As URL addresses are frequently textual, they can have evidential functions independent of the material that they link to.

Discourse practices are investigated in English and Polish online comments which display different degrees of linguistic extremism. The present contribution identifies the contexts and targets of such practices and argues that hate speech is conditioned by culture-driven emotional experience and emotion expression profiles prevailing in particular societies. The discussion focuses on Polish and UK English emotionality and on relevant cultural models of the negative emotion clusters identified in Polish and English online political and social comments in posts collected between 2013 and 2018 on topics connected mainly, though not exclusively, with migration and the perception of the Other. First, the article shows that there are differences in the display and expression of emotions between English and Polish discourses, the latter being more negatively explicit and more often addressing the current online interactant. Second, in both groups, two opposing camps are identified. Finally, the rise in meaning and expressiveness of radicalization is observed in both English and Polish across the investigated period.

The threat of the Islamic State is realised both in its attacks and its discourse. To illustrate the role of linguistic threats, the present study investigates the ISIS online propaganda magazine Dabiq by combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (Romero-Trillo 2008; Baker et al. 2008). Following the two groups described by van Dijk (2003), which are represented by the in-group (ISIS) and the out-group (against ISIS), we propose a third element: the translocal group (i.e., the people in between). The results show the substantial presence of linguistic strategies enhanced by Dangerous Speech (Benesch 2013) to create a high segregation between the groups. Also, the analysis shows the inextricable relationship between conflict and dangerous language and the need to investigate this link further, with special reference to the polarisation of the groups and to the subsequent escalation of violence in discourse.

Hate violence which denigrates a person’s social identity whether it involves physical or verbal aggression off or online – is a communicative act. It transmits a message to the victim that they are devalued and unwelcome. It is a marginalising and exclusionary message. Answering back to hate violence by challenging hateful expression is one way of responding. It is a form of ‘civil courage’. Yet why should anybody want to take a stand and speak out – given the risks involved that perpetrators might turn on those who intervene or respond in some other way? This paper proposes that the importance of civil courage goes beyond being the right thing to do, or the humane thing, when a bystander witnesses hate violence off- or online. Instead, if we comprehend hate violence as a communicative act, and if we understand the particular impact of the exclusionary message it sends (and understand how bystander inaction can magnify the felt sense of social exclusion), then we might appreciate the potential value of an act of civil courage in response. There is a moral imperative for civil courage as it answers back to hate violence by sending an inclusionary message to the victim – as reasoned in this paper.