Stavros Assimakopoulos

Context in Relevance Theory

Revisiting earlier research in the area (Assimakopoulos, Context Selection and Relevance, 2003), this paper sets out to investigate the notion of context from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Endorsing the idea that, in cognitive terms, contexts for utterance interpretation are best viewed as sets of assumptions that are brought to bear during the processing of an utterance, I collect the main arguments that relevance theorists have put forth regarding their treatment, focusing mainly on the central innovation of Relevance Theory on the matter, i.e. the proposal that contexts are actually selected during utterance comprehension rather than determined in advance of it. I then address the question of how contexts for interpretation are constructed on-line as well as how considerations of relevance, in the technical sense that Sperber and Wilson have assigned to the term, facilitate the admittedly effortless selection of contexts by the hearer and, to a certain extent, the speaker too.

The C.O.N.T.A.C.T. Methodological Approach

As already hinted at in the previous chapter, the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project covered two main strands of research: the expression of hate speech and its perception. To these ends, a multi-method approach was adopted, encompassing different types of data. In this chapter, we will outline the shared procedures of data collection and analysis in relation to both the production data, i.e. online comments to news reports, and the perceptual data, i.e. interviews.

THE EXPRESSION OF POLITENESS IN A BILINGUAL SETTING: EXPLORING THE CASE OF MALTESE ENGLISH

Single-moment studies have traditionally been carried out with the aim of investigating the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills of non-native speakers compared to those of native speakers of a particular language. The present study aims to investigate the parallel skills in expressing politeness of Maltese bilingual speakers rather than differences between native and non-native speakers in this respect. Since the variety of English spoken in Malta has often been characterised as distinct from British English, we used a small-scale spoken discourse completion task to examine the extent to which British English and Maltese affect the expression of politeness in Maltese English, in the context of requests and apologies. To this end, we compared the responses provided by three distinct groups of participants in terms of the use of particular politeness strategies, as well as the frequency and intonation of politeness markers. The re-sults obtained remain largely inconclusive partly due to certain limitations arising from use of the discourse completion task methodology. They nevertheless do provide preliminary evidence, which is, to our mind, worth exploring further, of a close similarity between Maltese English and Maltese in terms of the into-nation that accompanies markers of politeness.

Pragmatics at its Interfaces

The traditional analysis of the quantifiers some and some ... not is customarily given via the concepts of scalar implicature, Horn’s scales and the logical relations implied by the logical square. In this contribution, I challenge this view by arguing that the pragmatic relation between these particulars is not an implicature, but rather an explicature, that is, a pragmatic development of an utterance’s propositional form. To this end, I provide a Boolean semantics and pragmatics for the particulars at hand, and discuss the consequences of my account for pragmatic analysis, especially in relation to the properties of calculability and cancellability that implicatures are associated with. In closing, I propose a possible answer to Horn’s conjecture about the well-known issue of the non-lexicalisation of negative particulars (the O vertex in the logical square).All of the papers included in this volume offer some novel and/or updated perspective on issues of central importance in pragmatics, suggesting original ways in which research in the particular areas they adhere to could advance. Apart from the obvious aim of motivating further discussion on the topics it touches on, a central objective of this volume is to underline that research in pragmatics can and does substantially inform research in numerous other fields of enquiry, namely philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and conversation analysis, revealing in this way the truly interdisciplinary nature of pragmatics theorizing. In this respect, and given that most of the contributions in this volume are from leading scholars in their respective fields, it is clearly expected that the ideas put forth in this volume will have a profound and long-lasting impact for future research in the area.

Young People’s Perception of Hate Speech

The present chapter, much like the previous one, comprises a series of short sections, each focusing on a particular aspect arising from the interview discussions. The analyses adopt predominantly thematic qualitative approaches embedded within various theoretical perspectives and are meant to explore the ways in which young people perceive hate speech and matters associated with it. Again, it should be noted that even though each section is based on a particular national setting, the overall argumentation is of relevance to other contexts and to the wider discussion of the specific phenomenon in focus.

Online hate speech in the European Union : a discourse-analytic perspective

The book looks at online hate speech, compiling research from a European project CONTACT. My chapter looks at the anti-hate speech legislation of the EU and several Member States.European Commission, DG Justice: Rights, equality and citizenship programme (C.O.N.T.A.C.T.: JUST/2014/RRAC/AG/ HATE/6706)• You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to puresupport@bib.sdu.dk

Online Hate Speech in the European Union

The book looks at online hate speech, compiling research from a European project CONTACT. My chapter looks at the anti-hate speech legislation of the EU and several Member States.European Commission, DG Justice: Rights, equality and citizenship programme (C.O.N.T.A.C.T.: JUST/2014/RRAC/AG/ HATE/6706)• You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to puresupport@bib.sdu.dk

Hate speech in the EU and the C.O.N.T.A.C.T project

The book looks at online hate speech, compiling research from a European project CONTACT. My chapter looks at the anti-hate speech legislation of the EU and several Member States.European Commission, DG Justice: Rights, equality and citizenship programme (C.O.N.T.A.C.T.: JUST/2014/RRAC/AG/ HATE/6706)• You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to puresupport@bib.sdu.dk

Analysis of Online Comments to News Reports

Having outlined the common methodological perspective that C.O.N.T.A.C.T. partners adopted for both research strands of the project, it is now time to turn to a general discussion of the results obtained. To this end, this chapter will focus on the analysis of the comments corpora that were compiled at the first stage of our investigation; through the application of different techniques and against the background of various theoretical standpoints, the following sections touch on topics of central importance for the discourse-analytic discussion of hate speech, broadly construed.

Exploring xenophobic and homophobic attitudes in Malta : linking the perception of social practice with textual analysis

Abstract Reporting on research undertaken under the auspices of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project, the present paper investigates the roots of xenophobic and homophobic attitudes in Malta and the extent to which these can be pinpointed in the lexical choices made in discriminatory comments posted online in reaction to local news stories pertaining to migrants and members of the LGBTIQ community. Adopting Fairclough’s threedimensional framework (1995), we start off by presenting the values that underlie local discriminatory attitudes as social practice, as these were identified by the participants of four focus group interviews that were conducted at the University of Malta. In this respect, while xenophobia seems to be a far more pressing issue in Malta, homophobia, which is still also present, is taken to be predominantly triggered by deep-rooted religious beliefs and allegiance to heteronormative values. Then, when it comes to xenophobia, the main relevant trigger seems to be the perceived threat that the different collective background of a particular subset of migrants in Malta poses to the local culture. In an attempt to show that these values can also be discerned by examining even the most basic textual characteristics of a dataset comprising xenophobic and homophobic talk in the local context, we turn to identify them by looking at quantitative measures pertaining to lexical choice and metaphorical extension in the relevant parts of our corpus. In this way, we provide evidence for the fundamental – for Critical Discourse Analysis – claim that the textual analysis of a relevant dataset can indeed reveal the axiological framework that underlies the negative stance that the general population may have in relation to particular minorities, showcasing the relevance of discourse analytic methods for the broader understanding of discrimination and hate speech.