Covert hate speech
A contrastive study of Greek and Greek Cypriot online discussions with an emphasis on irony
Previous research on extremist discourse has revealed that racism is linguistically shaped by its socio-cultural
context. For instance, a comparison between Greek Cypriot and Greek online data indicated that the two communities use different
linguistic means and strategies to express their aversion to the Other, and that Greek comments are more overtly insulting than
Greek Cypriot comments (Baider and Constantinou 2017a; Assimakopoulos and Baider 2019). The present study focuses on how irony is used to disseminate hate
speech, albeit covertly. Our dataset comprises online Greek and Greek Cypriot comments posted on social media and collected during
the same period of time (2015- 2016) within an EU project. We use concepts such as verisimilitude and overt untruthfulness to
deconstruct ironic racist comments. We conclude that irony in both datasets fulfils three socio-pragmatic functions: it serves to
insult or humiliate members of groups targeted for their ethnic identity; it creates or reinforces negative feelings against such
groups; it promotes beliefs that could be used to legitimate their mistreatment. Regarding socio-cultural differences, it emerges
that the use of the Greek Cypriot vernacular and the appeal to indigenous in-group social stereotypes influence the way irony
shapes racist comments and reinforces in-group membership.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Hate speech and irony
- 2.1Covert hate speech
- 2.2Socio-pragmatic functions of irony
- 2.3Interpretation of data and context
- 3.Data and methodology
- 3.1Corpus collection and annotation scheme
- 3.2Specificities for the Greek and Greek Cypriot teams
- 3.3Quantitative results for Greece and Cyprus
- 4.Conveying racism with irony
- 4.1An overview of our findings
- 4.2Irony and echoic mention of the ‘doxa’, overt truthfulness
- 4.3Ironic references to the Self and overt untruthfulness
- 4.4Ironic fictionalisation
- 5.Concluding remarks
- 5.1Covert racism and ironic hate speech
- 5.2Cross-cultural dimensions of irony
- Notes
-
References
-
Sitography
References
Alba-Juez, Laura, and Geoff Thompson
Assimakopoulos, Stavros, and Fabienne Baider
2019 “
Hate Speech in Online Reactions to News Articles in Cyprus and Greece.”
Proceedings of the 13th ICGL Conference, University of Westminster, Westminster,
September 2018.
Attardo, Salvatore
2000 “
Irony as Relevant Inappropriateness.”
Journal of Pragmatics 32 (6): 793–826.
Attardo, Salvatore
2001 Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak
2008 “
A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.”
Discourse and Society 191: 273–306.
Baider, Fabienne
2013 “
Hate: Saliency Features in Cross-cultural Semantics.” In
Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics, ed. by
István Kecskés, and
Jesús Romero-Trillo, 7–25. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Baider, Fabienne, and Maria Constantinou
2014 “
How to Make People Feel Good when Wishing Hell: Golden Dawn and National Front Discourse, Emotions and Argumentation.” In
New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms Series: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, ed. by
Jesús Romero–Trillo, 179–210. Dordrecht: Springer.
Baider, Fabienne, and Maria Constantinou
Baider, Fabienne, and Maria Constantinou
Balibar, Etienne
1991 “
Is there a Neo-racism?” In
Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. by
Etienne Balibar, and
Immanuel Wallerstein, 17–28. London: Verso.
Barker, Martin
1981 The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. London: Junction Books.
Ben-David, Anat, and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández
2016 “
Hate Speech and Covert Discrimination on Social Media: Monitoring the Facebook Pages of Extreme-right Political Parties in Spain.”
International Journal of Communication 101: 1167–1193.
Berry, Mike, Iñaki Garcia-Blanco, and Kerry Moore
2016 Press Coverage of the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in the EU: A Content Analysis of Five European Countries. [Project Report]. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
[URL]
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo
1997 ‘‘
Rethinking Racism.’’
American Sociological Review 62 (3): 465–80.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo
2010 Racism without Racists. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Braun, Angelika, and Astrid Schmiedel
2018 “
The Phonetics of Ambiguity: A Study on Verbal Irony.” In
Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research, ed. by
Esme Winter-Froemel, and
Verena Thaler, 111–136. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
[URL]
Brindle, Andrew
2016 The Language of Hate: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of White Supremacist Language. London/New York: Routledge.
Brown, Alexander
2018 “
What is so Special about Online (as Compared to Offline) Hate Speech?”
Ethnicities 18 (3): 297–326.
Brown, Christopher
2009 “
White Supremacist Discourse on the Internet and the Construction of Whiteness Ideology.”
Howard Journal of Communications 20 (2): 189–208.
Chovanec, Jan
2018 “
Irony as Counter Positioning.” In
The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter, ed. by
Manuel Jobert, and
Sandrine Sorlin, 165–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Citron, Danielle Keats
2014 Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cohen-Almagor, Raphael
2017 “
Why Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side?”
Philosophia 451: 919–929.
Cuddy, Amy J. C., Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick
2007 “
The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (4): 631–48.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Leyla Marti, Meilian Mei, Minna Nevala, and Gina Schauer
2010 “
Cross-cultural Variation in the Perception of Impoliteness: A Study of Impoliteness Events Reported by Students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey.”
Intercultural Pragmatics 7 (4): 597–624.
Daniels, Jessie
2008 “
Race, Civil Rights, and Hate Speech in the Digital Era.” In
Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, ed. by
Anna Everett, 129–154. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennison, James, and Lenka Drazanova
2018 Public Attitudes on Migration. Firenze: European University Institute.
Dynel, Marta
2017 “
The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness.”
Corpus Pragmatics 11: 3–36.
Dynel, Marta
2018 Irony, Deception and Humour: Seeking the Truth about Overt and Covert Untruthfulness. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Erjavec, Karmen, and Melita Poler Kovačič
2012 “‘
You don’t understand, this is a new war!’: Analysis of Hate Speech in News Web Sites’ Comments.”
Mass Communication and Society 151: 899–92.
Fessler, Daniel M. T., and Kevin J. Haley
2003 “
The Strategy of Affect: Emotions in Human Cooperation.” In
The Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, ed. by
Peter Hammerstein, 7–36. Boston: MIT Press.
Fine, Gary A.
1983 “
Sociological Approaches to the Study of Humor.” In
Handbook of Humor Research, ed. by
Paul E. McGhee, and
Jeffrey H. Goldstein, 159–181. New York, NY: Springer.
Ford, Thomas E., and Mark A. Ferguson
2004 “
Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory.”
Personality and Social Psychology Review 8(1): 79–94.
Giora, Rachel
2003 On our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hill, Jane
2008 The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hunston, Susan, and Geoffrey Thompson
2000 Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jane, Emma A.
2014 “
‘Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut’: Understanding E-bile.”
Feminist Media Studies 1441: 531–546.
Jane, Emma A.
2017 Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. London: Sage.
Jobert, Manuel, and Sandrine Sorlin
Keum, Brian TaeHyuk, and Matthew Miller
2018 “
Racism on the Internet: Conceptualization and Recommendations for Research.”
Psychology of Violence 8 (6): 782–791.
Kim, Sei-hill, John P. Carvalho, Andrew G. Davis, and Amanda M. Mullins
2011 “
The View of the Border: News Framing of the Definition, Causes, and Solutions to Illegal Immigration.”
Mass Communication and Society 141: 292–314.
Leech, Geoffrey
2014 The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Locher, Miriam A.
2011 “
Situated Impoliteness: The Interface between Relational Work and Identity Construction.” In
Situated Politeness, ed. by
Bethan L. Davies,
Michael Haugh, and
Andrew John Merrison, 187–208. London: Continuum.
Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering
2008 “
You must be Joking: The Sociological Critique of Humour and Comic Media.”
Sociology Compass 2 (3): 808–820.
Meyer, John C.
2000 “
Humor as a Double-edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”
Communication Theory 10 (3): 310–31.
Millar, Sharon, Fabienne H. Baider, and Stavros Assimakopoulos
2017 “
The C.O.N.T.A.C.T. Methodological Approach.” In
Online Hate Speech in the European Union: A Discourse Analytic Perspective, ed. by
Stavros Assimakopoulos,
Fabienne H. Baider, and
Sharon Millar, 17–24. New York, NY: Springer Briefs in Linguistics.
[URL]
O’Sullivan, Patrick, and Andrew J. Flanagin
2003 “
Reconceptualizing ‘Flaming’ and other Problematic Messages.”
New Media and Society 511: 69–94.
Partington, Alan
2007 “
Irony and Reversal of Evaluation.”
Journal of Pragmatics 39 (9): 1547–1569.
Pérez, Raúl
2013 “
Learning to Make Racism Funny in the ‘Color-blind’ Era: Stand-up Comedy Students, Performance Strategies, and the (Re)production of Racist Jokes in Public.”
Discourse and Society 24 (4): 478–503.
Pérez, Raúl
2017 “
Racism without Hatred? Racist Humor and the Myth of ‘Colorblindness’.”
Sociological Perspectives 60 (5): 956–974.
Philips, Michael
1984 “
Racist Acts and Racist Humor.”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 75–96.
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak
2001 Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetoric of Racism and Anti-semitism. London/New York: Routledge.
Shelley, Cameron
2001 “
The Bicoherence Theory of Situational Irony.”
Cognitive Science 251: 775–818.
Sophocleous, Andrea, and Christiana Themistocleous
2014 “
Projecting Social and Discursive Identities through Code-switching on Facebook: The Case of Greek Cypriots.”
Language@Internet, 111,
article 5.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1981 “
Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction.” In
Radical Pragmatics, ed. by
Peter Cole, 295–318. New York: Academic Press.
Taguieff, Pierre-André
1990 “
The New Cultural Racism in France.”
Telos 821: 109–122.
Taguieff, Pierre-André
2001 The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Trimikliniotis, Nicos, and Corina Demetriou
2014 “
Cyprus.” In
European Immigration: A Sourcebook, 2nd edition, ed. by
Anna Triantafyllidou, and
Ruby Gropas, 67–82. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Tsakona, Villy
2018 “
Online Joint Fictionalization.” In
The Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters, ed. by
Villy Tsakona, and
Jan Chovanec, 229–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tsakona, Villy, and Argiris Archakis
2019 “
Racism in Recent Greek Migrant Jokes Humor.”
International Journal of Humor Research 32 (2): 267–287.
Tsakona, Villy, Rania Karachaliou, and Argiris Archakis
UNCHR 2019 report
Perceptions of Cypriots about Refugees and Migrants [URL]
Utsumi, Akira
2000 “
Verbal Irony as Implicit Display of Ironic Environment: Distinguishing Ironic Utterances from Non-irony.”
Journal of Pragmatics 32 (12): 1777–1806.
van Dijk, Teun A.
1987 Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. London: Sage Publications.
van Dijk, Teun A.
1991 Racism and the Press: Critical Studies in Racism and Migration. London/New York: Routledge.
van Dijk, Teun A.
2011 “
Discourse and Ideology”.
Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by
Teun van Dijk, 379–407. Newbury Park: Sage.
Waldron, Jeremy
2012 The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weaver, Simon
2007 “
Humour, Rhetoric and Racism: A Sociological Critique of Racist Humour.” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Bristol.
Weaver, Simon
2010 “
Liquid Racism and the Danish Prophet Muhammad Cartoons.”
Current Sociology 58 (5): 675–692.
Weaver, Simon
2011 “
Liquid Racism and the Ambiguity of Ali G.”
European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (3): 249–264.
Weaver, Simon
2016 The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking. London: Routledge.
Wilson, Deidre
2006 “
The Pragmatics of Verbal Irony: Echo or Pretence?”
Lingua 1161: 1722–1743.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Baider, Fabienne
2022.
Covert Hate Speech, Conspiracy Theory and Anti-semitism: Linguistic Analysis Versus Legal Judgement.
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique
Lee, Carmen
2020.
Doxxing as discursive action in a social movement.
Critical Discourse Studies ► pp. 1 ff.
Perifanos, Konstantinos & Dionysis Goutsos
2021.
Multimodal Hate Speech Detection in Greek Social Media.
Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 5:7
► pp. 34 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.