Chapter 8
Towards a relevance-theoretic account of hate speech
Hate speech has been studied as a social, psychological and legal phenomenon in various frameworks
offered by relevant disciplines, with most famous account being Judith Butler’s analysis of hate speech in
terms of Austinian speech act theory. This chapter explores the possibility of applying relevance-theoretic
analysis to hate speech. It argues that all kinds of hate speech, ranging from most direct to most covert, are
instances of ostensive behavior that requires being processed together with some mental representations,
corresponding to either intuitive or reflected beliefs about generalized inferiority of a group of people by
virtue of their race, ethnicity, faith/atheism, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or etc. or, their
corresponding meta-representations, for greatest (tentatively optimal) relevance.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 3.Hate speech: Some legal, social and pragmatic issues
- 4.Some terminological refinements
- 5.Understanding covert hate speech in relevance-theoretic terms
- 6.The ‘thin skin’ phenomenon vs. cognitive vigilance. Understanding of hate speech by targeted
audiences
- 7.Slurs and quasi-slurs
- 8.The hate component
- 9.Instances of non-literalness of hate speech
- 10.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
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Chetty, Naganna, Sreejith Alathur, Dittin Andrews & Vishal Kumar
2021.
2021 6th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Security (ICCCS),
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