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Part of
Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska
[Figurative Thought and Language 8] 2020
► pp. 229–257

Chapter 8
Towards a relevance-theoretic account of hate speech

| University of Warsaw, Poland

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.

Keywords: hate speech, covert and overt hate speech, direct and indirect hate speech, hate speech and cognitive vigilance, slurs and quasi-slurs
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
  • References
Published online: 20 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.8.08lin
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