Emotional deixis in online hate speech

Abstract

Demonstrative determiners can be used to convey the speaker’s emotional involvement in the subject matter (Lakoff, 1974). They also play a role in establishing solidarity effects between speaker and addressee, thus potentially being used to express complex social meanings and attitudes (Lakoff, 1974; Chen, 1990; Acton and Potts, 2014), a feature that is worth exploring in the context of the characterisation of hate speech in Computer-Mediated Discourse (CMD). This chapter explores the use of demonstrative determiners in a subcorpus of the netlang corpus in Portuguese. All occurrences of demonstrative determiners were encoded according to the affective value retrieved from a sentiment analysis and the variables examined included markers of exclamativity and the type of noun (proper or common) that follows the determiner. The results reveal that the negative sentiment value is higher when the demonstrative is followed by a proper noun and is inserted in an exclamatory sentence. On the contrary, positive-rated comments are more frequent when exclamativity is not present. This entails that the interaction between exclamativity markers and affective use of demonstrative determiners is a possible feature of hate speech in CMD.