The Grammar of Hate

Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse

Natalia Knoblock

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781108834131
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108998420
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Hate speech continues to be an issue of key social significance, yet while its lexical and discursive aspects have been widely studied, its grammatical traits have been hitherto overlooked. This book seeks to address this gap by bringing together a global team of scholars to explore the morphosyntactic features of hateful and aggressive discourse. Drawing on thirteen diverse cross-linguistic case studies, it reveals how hate is expressed in political discourse, slang, and social media, and towards a range of target groups relating to gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic identity. Based on ideas from functional and cognitive linguistics, each thematic part demonstrates how features such as morphology, word formation, pronoun use, and syntactic structures are manipulated for the purpose of expressing hostility and hate. An innovative approach to an age-old problem, this book is essential reading for researchers and students of hate speech and verbal aggression.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Animacy and Countability of Slurs: Shifting Grammatical Categories
• 2 Language Aggression in English Slang: The Case of the -o Suffix
• 3 Adj+ie/y Nominalizations in Contemporary English: From Diminution to Pejoration
• 4 Grammatical Gender and Offensiveness in Modern Greek Slang Vocabulary
• 5 Unseen Gender: Misgendering of Transgender Individuals in Czech
• 6 The Neutering Neuter: The Discursive Use of German Grammatical Gender in Dehumanization
• 7 Neutering Unpopular Politicians: The Neuter Gender and ‘It’ as a Dehumanizing Grammatical Metaphor
• 8 The Power of a Pronoun
• 9 Is Play on Words Fair Play or Dirty Play? On Ill-Meaning Use of Morphological Blending
• 10 Expressive German Adjective and Noun Compounds in Aggressive Discourse: Morphopragmatic and Sociolinguistic Evidence from Austrian Corpora
• 11 ‘Kill the Invaders’: Imperative Verbs and their Grammatical Patients in Tarrant’s The Great Replacement
• 12 ‘I am no racist but …’: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Xenophobic Hate Speech Constructions in Danish and German Social Media Discourse
• 13 Homophobic Space–Times: Lexicogrammatical and Discourse–Semantic Aspects of the Softscapes of Hate
• Index