The Grammar of Hate: Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse

Description

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.

Natalia Knoblock is Associate Professor at Saginaw Valley State University. Her research interests lie in political and cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. She is the editor of Language of Conflict (2020) and co-editor of the Journal of Language and Discrimination.

'We need this book. Grammar in all its guises is given short-shrift in studies of hateful, aggressive discourse, yet even a cursory glance at the contents of this book will show that its neglect is not merited. An accessible, interesting, diverse, illuminating read!' Jonathan Culpeper, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University 'This book offers a leap forward towards better understanding aggressive, hateful, and dehumanizing communication from a morphosyntactic perspective contextualized by its social interactions.' Monica Cantero, Drew University