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Grammar of Hate: deadline extension

Grammar of Hate panel at the 8th CADAAD conference, July 7-9 2020

Researchers of verbal aggression, “othering” and dehumanization in discourse, hate speech, and similar fields are invited to submit proposals for a thematic panel at the upcoming Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) conference at the University of Huddersfield, UK on July 7-9 (https://2020cadaad.wordpress.com). The panel aims to examine grammatical features of hateful, aggressive, and dehumanizing language as the majority of existing research has concentrated on the lexical aspects of such type of communication (e.g., Erjavec & Kovačič, 2012; Knoblock, 2017; Leets & Giles, 1997; Lillian, 2007; Musolff, 2015), and its grammatical peculiarities remain largely unexplored.

We are interested to examine a possible link between hateful intentions or the speakers, their lexical choices, and the grammatical characteristics of the speech that aims to hurt, dehumanize, and marginalize groups or individuals.  We welcome a variety of research approaches and various methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, or mixed. We would like to see projects conducted in different geographic, political, socio-cultural, and economic settings, and to bring together scholars from several fields, such as linguistics, discourse analysis, communication and media studies, among others. We hope to expand the scope of hate speech research by focusing on the grammatical aspects in addition to the lexical and discursive ones.

Some of (but not limited to) the possible topics to investigate could include:

- manipulation of personal pronouns
- usage of neuter morphological markings where masculine of feminine are expected (if used with nefarious intent)
- usage of inanimate morphology where animate is expected (in languages that differentiate them)
- nontraditional usage of mass/countable nouns if used with nefarious intent to dehumanize groups of people
- syntactic patters characteristic of hate speech and “othering” 

This list, of course, is not exhaustive, and other topics not itemized here are welcome as long as they involve manipulation of grammatical features with an intent to denigrate, insult, and dehumanize the referent.

Please send your abstract of up to 400 words (excluding references) to cadaadpanel@gmail.com by December 5, 2019. In your abstract, please clearly state the aims and research questions of your paper, its theoretical foundations, the data and methods used to analyse it, as well as some of the findings.
The panel is organized by Natalia Knoblock (Saginaw Valley State University) and Magda Stroinska (McMaster University). If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at nlknoblo@svsu.edu or cadaadpanel@gmail.com .

References:

Erjavec, K., & Kovačič, M. P. (2012). “You Don't Understand, This is a New War!” Analysis of Hate Speech in News Web Sites' Comments. Mass Communication and Society, 15(6), 899-920.

Knoblock, N. (2017). Xenophobic Trumpeters: A corpus-assisted discourse study of Donald Trump's Facebook conversations. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict5(2), 295-322.

Leets, L., & Giles, H. (1997). Words as weapons—when do they wound? Investigations of harmful speech. Human Communication Research24(2), 260-301.

Lillian, D. L. (2007). A thorn by any other name: sexist discourse as hate speech. Discourse & Society18(6), 719-740.

Musolff, A. (2015). Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict3(1), 41-56.