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Emotional Deixis in Online Hate Speech
Publication . Aguiar, Joana; Barbosa, Pilar
In recent years, the debate around hate speech in online settings has flourished. Automatic tools have been developed not only to detect hate speech but also to distinguish it from offensive and non-offensive language. Most of these automatic tools use a lexicon-based approach or a combination of it with sentiment analysis (Davidson et al. 2017; Martins et al. 2018 and references therein). Nonetheless, content words alone are not the only linguistic elements that may convey expressiveness or heightened emotional states. As observed by Potts and Schwarz (2010), the sources of expressive content in language use are not always transparent and often arise from the way apparently innocuous functional elements are used. One such case is the use of demonstratives. Besides their function of indicating spatial and temporal relations or establishing anaphoric reference, demonstratives are often used to convey the speaker’s emotional involvement — emotional proximity or distance — in the subject matter (Lakoff 1974). In addition, work on demonstrative use has highlighted the role of demonstratives in establishing a common ground or shared perspective between speaker and addressee, thus potentially being used as tools to express complex social meanings and attitudes (Lakoff 1979, Chen 1990, Acton and Potts 2014).
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