Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:17:43.849Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - ‘I am no racist but …’

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Xenophobic Hate Speech Constructions in Danish and German Social Media Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Klaus Geyer ,
Eckhard Bick  and
Andrea Kleene
Edited by
Natalia Knoblock
Natalia Knoblock
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
Get access

Summary

The chapter discusses corpus–linguistic challenges and possibilities involved in exploring Hate Speech linked to different constructions in Danish and German. Compiled especially for the XPEROHS–project, grammatically and semantically annotated corpora of Danish and German Twitter and Facebook posts enable qualitative and quantitative exploration of individual word forms or lexemes as well as constructions, understood as conventionalized, non–compositional form-meaning pairings. The chapter illustrates and explains various corpus–linguistic strategies applied to the XPEROHS–corpora and presents their results. Furthermore, we discuss prominent grammatical constructions used to denigrate certain groups like foreigners or Muslims in German and Danish. These include, for example, the I am no racist but… construction, which only superficially signals a balanced standpoint using a highly formulaic introductory phrase. Another construction that works similarly in German and Danish is the alleged (+ ADJ) + NOUN–construction (as in the alleged refugees) in which the adjective supposedly reverses the meaning of the noun. However, though closely related, the two languages do not share all constructions. This is exemplified by the German oh–so + ADJ + NOUN–construction (as in the oh-so-peaceful Muslims), that negates a positive characteristic indicated by the adjective in an ironic way.

Keywords

hate speechsocial mediaconstruction grammarcorpus linguisticsxenophobiaracismantisemitismislamophobiahostilityconstraint grammar
Type
Chapter
Information
The Grammar of Hate
Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse
 , pp. 241 - 261
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agnetta, M. (2018). Die Entmachtung der Metapher: Zur Dekonstruktion sprachlich vermittelter Feindbilder im europäischen Flüchtlingsdiskurs. Metaphorik.de, 28, 11–46.Google Scholar
Baumgarten, N., Bick, E., Geyer, K., Iversen, D. A., Kleene, A., Lindø, A. V., Neitsch, J., Niebuhr, O., Nielsen, R., and Petersen, E. N. (2019). Towards balance and boundaries in public discourse: Expressing and perceiving online hate speech (XPEROHS). In RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, 50, 87–108.Google Scholar
Bergs, A., and Diewald, G. (2009a). Contexts and Constructions. In Bergs, A., and Diewald, G. (eds.), Contexts and Constructions. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bergs, A., and Diewald, G. (eds.) (2009b). Contexts and Constructions. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bick, E. (2005). CorpusEye: Et brugervenligt web-interface for grammatisk opmærkede korpora. In Widell, P., and Kunøe, M. (eds.), 10. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog, 7–8 October 2004, Proceedings. Aarhus University, 46–57.Google Scholar
Bick, E., and Didriksen, T. (2015). CG-3 – Beyond Classical Constraint Grammar. In Megyesi, B. (ed.), Proceedings of NODALIDA 2015, 11–13 May 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania. Linköping: LiU Electronic Press, 31–39.Google Scholar
Bick, E., and Didriksen, T. (2017‒). VISL Corpuseye. https://corp.hum.sdu.dk/Google Scholar
Bick, E., Geyer, K., and Kleene, A. (2021). ‘Die ách so friedlichen Muslime’: Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung von Formulierungsmustern fremdenfeindlicher Aussagen in Sozialen Medien. In Wachs, S., Koch-Priewe, B., and Zick, A. (eds.), Hate Speech: Multidisziplinäre Analysen und Handlungsoptionen. Wiesbaden: Springer, 81–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Czicha, D., Dekalo, V., and Diewald, G. (eds.) (2018). Konstruktionsgrammatik VI: Varianz in der konstruktionsgrammatischen Schematiz ität. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
ECRI = European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (2016). ECRI General Policy Recommendation No. 15: On Combating Hate Speech. Strasbourg. Retrieved from https://rm.coe.int/ecri-general-policy-recommendation-no-15-on-combating-hatespeech/16808b5b01Google Scholar
Evert, S., and Hardie, A. (2011). Twenty-first Century Corpus Workbench: Updating a Query Architecture for the New Millennium. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2011 Conference, University of Birmingham, UK.Google Scholar
Finkbeiner, R. (ed.) (2019). On the role of pragmatics in construction grammar, Special Issue. Constructions and Frames, 11(2).Google Scholar
Fischer, K., and Nikiforidou, K. (2015). On the interaction of constructions with register and genre, Special Issue. Constructions and Frames, 7(2).Google Scholar
Geyer, K. (2018). Hadetalens ‘grammatik’ [The Grammar of Hate]. In Ny Forskning i Grammatik, 25, 16–33. https://tidsskrift.dk/nfg/article/view/109300/159321Google Scholar
Geyer, K. (2019). Die ‘Grammatik’ der Hassrede: Am Beispiel des Dänischen. In Strässler, J. (ed.), Language(s) for Europe: Multilingualism as a Chance. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 195–207.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure: Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaki, S. (2021). Vermin who only want to out-vermin the verminest vermin. Ein sprachwissenschaftlicher Blick auf Hate Speech. Manuscript, Research project ‘Hate Speech and its Recognition by AI’, University of Hildesheim.Google Scholar
Jaki, S., and de Smedt, T. (2019). Right-wing German hate speech on Twitter: Analysis and automatic detection. arXiv:1910.07518.Google Scholar
Klubička, F., and Fernández, R. (2018). Examining a hate speech corpus for hate speech detection and popularity prediction. In Proceedings of 4REAL Workshop (ELREC 2018), pp. 9–16.Google Scholar
Kratzke, N. (2017). The #BTW17 Twitter Dataset: Recorded Tweets of the Federal Election Campaigns of 2017 for the 19th German Bundestag [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.835735CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meibauer, J. (ed.) (2013). Hassrede / Hate Speech: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einer aktuellen Diskussion. Gießen: Gießener elektronische Bibliothek.Google Scholar
Millar, S., Geyer, K., Lindø, A. V., and Nielsen, R. (2017). Changing Participant Roles in the Expression of Hate Speech. In Assimakopoulos, S., Baider, F. H., and Millar, S. (eds.), Online Hate Speech in the European Union: A Discourse-Analytic Perspective. Berlin: Springer, 46–52.Google Scholar
Millar, S., Nielsen, R., Lindø, A. V., and Geyer, K. (2020). The use of hyperlinking as evidential practice in Danish online hate speech. Pragmatics and Society, 11(2), 241–261.Google Scholar
Musolff, A. (2015). Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 3(1), 41–56. doi.org/10.1075/jlac.3.1.02musGoogle Scholar
Neitsch, J., Niebuhr, O., and Kleene, A. (2021). What if Hate Speech Really Was Speech? Towards Explaining Hate Speech in a Cross-Modal Approach. In Wachs, S., Koch-Priewe, B., and Zick, A. (eds.), Hate Speech: Multidisziplinäre Analysen und Handlungsoptionen. Wiesbaden: Springer, 105–135.Google Scholar
Nobata, C., Tetreault, J., Thomas, A., Mehdad, Y., and Chang, Y. (2016). Abusive language detection in online user content. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW’ 16 (Montreal), 145–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Östmann, J.-O., and Trousdale, G. (2014). Dialects, Discourse, and Construction Grammar. In Hoffmann, T., and Trousdale, G. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 476–490.Google Scholar
Ross, B., Rist, M., Carbonell, G., Cabrera, B., Kurowsky, N., and Wojatzki, M. (2016). Measuring the Reliability of Hate Speech Annotations: The Case of the European Refugee Crisis. In Proceedings of NLP4CMC III: 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer-Mediated Communication (Bochum), Bochumer Linguistische Arbeitsberichte, vol. 17, 6–9 September.Google Scholar
Sanguinetti, M., Poletto, F., Bosco, C., Patti, V., and Stranisci, M. (2018). An Italian Twitter Corpus of Hate Speech against Immigrants. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2018), Miyazaki, Japan, 2798–2895.Google Scholar
Waseem, Z., and Hovy, D. (2016). Hateful Symbols or Hateful People? – Predictive Features for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter. In Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop (San Diego, California). ACL. 88–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiegand, M., Siegel, M., and Ruppenhofer, J. (2018). Overview of the GermEval 2018 Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. In Proceedings of GermEval 2018, 14th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2018), Vienna, 1–10.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×