Hate speech and speech-act theory.

How to express and restrain hate in language use

Abstract

Hate speech is analyzed as a kind of insulting, that is an expressive speech act aiming at triggering a certain feeling in the addressee. In particular, it is shown that aggressive emotions like hate or contempt can also be signaled by other linguistic devices besides ethnic slurs, for instance, prosodical, morphological, and syntactic patterns. These devices are potential markers of hate speech that a hate speaker uses, and a target understands, and may be conceived of as markers of illocutionary force. Furthermore, the analysis can cover indirect cases of hate speech. Special attention is drawn to the occasionally overlooked fact that potential hate speakers may engage in self-restraint: They can use weaker terms, they can use more indirect strategies, they can retract or deny their hate speech, and last but not least, they can refrain from using hateful speech act altogether.