Towards a relevance-theoretic account of hate speech
Jadwiga Linde-Usiekniewicz · Figurative thought and language · 2020
Abstract Hate speech has been studied as a social, psychological and legal phenomenon in various frameworks offered by relevant disciplines, with most famous account being Judith Butler’s analysis of hate speech in terms of Austinian speech act theory. This chapter explores the possibility of applying relevance-theoretic analysis to hate speech. It argues that all kinds of hate speech, ranging from most direct to most covert, are instances of ostensive behavior that requires being processed together with some mental representations, corresponding to either intuitive or reflected beliefs about generalized inferiority of a group of people by virtue of their race, ethnicity, faith/atheism, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or etc. or, their corresponding meta-representations, for greatest (tentatively optimal) relevance.