By intentionally challenging social diversity and thus disrupting social cohesion, hate speech (HS) remains an issue that poses practical problems such as detecting, monitoring, reporting it, and deciding when it is legally punishable. Despite the current upsurge in research on HS, some questions remain unanswered, one of which concerns the optimal linguistic criteria indicative of HS.
HS is generally defined as verbal aggression that (a) targets a specific social group (defined by law) and (2) is intentional. The target can be defined arguably more easily; however, determining intentionality is more intricate. One important linguistic feature of intentionality and thus a possible indicator of HS is lexical creativity, which manifests best in the use of neologisms (Vasilaki 2014:103; cf. Ruzaitė 2021). Hence, the aim of this study is to examine neologisms in Lithuanian internet comments and assess how much they are indicative of HS.
The data consists of 10,662 online comments (totalling 284,226 tokens) posted in response to 24 news reports on controversial issues related to one of the possible target groups of HS as defined by Lithuanian law. To determine how much creativity relates to HS, the data includes neutral, offensive comments, and comments containing HS. The analysis addresses three research questions: (1) What is the distribution of neologisms in the three types of comments?; (2) What morphological, syntactic, and lexical resources are used to create novel forms?; and (3) What are the themes of creative name-calling?
The analysis takes a primarily qualitative approach and applies the framework of pragmatics. It resorts to Vasilaki's (2014) and Culpeper's (2009) definitions of creativity and creative insults, and Martínez and Jus's (2013) perception of conventional and unconventional insults. To account for the themes of creative name-calling, Ljung's (2010: 35) categorization is applied.
The preliminary results show that neologisms clearly dominate in offensive and hateful comments but are not characteristic of neutral ones. They often appear in vocatives as insults and are part of discriminatory referential strategies used to refer to vulnerable groups. The most common way of derivation used to coin novel forms is that of affixation, and predominantly Russian suffixes are used when creating derogatory terms. The dominating themes include the sex-organ and sexual activities theme, the animal theme, and the filth theme.
References
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. Impoliteness: Using and understanding the language of offence. ESRC project website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/impoliteness/.
Ljung, Magnus. 2011. Swearing: A Cross-cultural Linguistic Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Martínez, José Mateo and Yus, Francisco. 2013. Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1 (1), 87-114.
Ruzaitė, Jūratė. (2021) How do haters hate? Verbal aggression in Lithuanian online comments. In I. Chiluwa (ed.), Discourse and Conflict: Analysing Text and Talk of Conflict, Hate and Peace-Building. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76485-2_5
Vasilaki, Maria. 2014. Name-calling in Greek YouTube comments. In Papers from the 9th Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, ed. Carolina Pérez-Arredondo, Margarita Calderón-López, Hilda Hidalgo-Avilés, and David Pask-Hughes, 90–110. Lancaster: Lancaster University.
