Language Aggression

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Language aggression refers to the use of verbal communication that is intended to harm, intimidate, or belittle others. It encompasses various forms of hostile speech, including insults, threats, and derogatory remarks, and is studied within fields such as linguistics, psychology, and communication to understand its impact on interpersonal relationships and social dynamics.

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In search of hate speech in Lithuanian public discourse: A corpus-assisted analysis of online comments

by Jurate Ruzaite

2018, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14.1; Special issue on Narrating hostility

The present paper aims to report on the preliminary findings from the initial stages of ongoing research on hate speech in Lithuanian online comments. Comments are marked strongly by such phenomena as flaming and trolling; therefore, in... more

Interestingly, the majority of offensive items include different references to a foolish person and are mainly nouns. They are often used against people who would defend migrants, LGBT or some other vulnerable groups and can also be treated as instances of flaming. However, though these terms can be considered as instances of impoliteness and hate speech, they can hardly be treated as indicators of hate crimes as they do not call for action, incite violence, or foster genocide.

In the current paper hate speech is defined following the definition proposed by Mafeza, who views hate speech as “all forms of expression which spread and promote hatred, incite or induce others to commit violence or genocide against a group of people based on their racial, national, ethnic and religious affiliation” (2016: 18). Hate speech can be expressed not only via verbal expression, but also through visual means; however, to limit the scope of analysis, in this paper my focus is on verbal expression only. In search of hate speech in Lithuanian public discourse: A corpus-assisted analysis of online comments

Table 3. Top 20 most frequent types (lexical words) Table 4. Offensive lexis in the wordlist (with frequency from 40 to 4 occurrences)

Table 5. Collocates of musulmon* (‘Muslim’) As can be seen in Table 5, there is only one negatively loaded collocate konspiratoriau (‘conspirator’), but its frequency is too low (2 occurrences) to make any generalisations. There are some single occurrences of negatively loaded words that appear with Muslim (unitazai (‘toilet bowls’), teroristam (‘for terrorists’), and galvarezu (‘of cutthroats’)), but only two of these items are used to refer to Muslims: teroristai (‘terrorists’) and galvarezai (‘cutthroats’), which appear in the noun phrases musulmonu teroristai (‘Muslim terrorists’) and galvarezu musulmonu (Muslim cutthroats); see example (2):

Table 6. Frequency of abusive lexis Regarding the frequency of iSsigimélis (‘pervert’), it is interesting to note that very similar trends were observed by Baider in relation to derogatory terms used to refer to non-heterosexuals in online comments in Cyprus (this volume).

Appendix 1. Top 30 types in the corpus data (grammatical and lexical words) References

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