Why soft hate speech matters: argumentativity and the dispersion of hatred towards minorities
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper corroborates the claim that soft hate speech develops argumentative inferences that justify discriminatory hatred, all the while helping establish a common ground of exclusionary and denigrating attitudes in society. Through the prism of Critical Discourse Studies, we synthesise ideas coming from the domains of Argumentation Theory and Cognitive Pragmatics, while drawing on examples from a corpus of comments made in response to LGBTQI + -related articles in Greek news portals. On the one hand, we employ the Argumentum Model of Topics, which enables us to break down how standpoint-argument couplings are inferred in discourse, showcasing how, despite not being overtly argumentative, the relevant discourses can be taken to still manifest an inherent argumentativity that justifies the development of discriminatory stances. Turning, on the other, to Relevance Theory and more specifically its specific approach to communication, which underlines the automaticity by which contextual interpretation takes place, we present a way in which, even though not directly communicated, the denigrated attitudes that are embedded in instances of soft hate speech still manage to creep in an audience’s cognitive environment.
Source: Critical Discourse Studies
Authors: Stavros Assimakopoulos, Dimitris Serafis
Institutions: University of Malta, University of Groningen
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4406132329