Sub-projects 2 and 3, for purposes of comparison, follow the same conceptual and methodological organisation, differing only in the language under scrutiny, and, thus, they are described together. Sub-projects 2 (for Danish) and 3 (for German) are concerned with a wider range of subtle mechanisms for expressing hate speech, focusing on morphological, syntactic and discourse level phenomena. They include large-scale corpus analyses of Danish and German as well as a smaller ‘case study’ investigation of rhetorical strategies in the comment sections of two Danish news providers.

The specific aims of the sub-projects are:

  1. to identify for hate speech a core (prototypical) repertoire of interactional meanings and patterns in the two languages based on corpus and interpretative analyses together with user perceptions;
  2. to differentiate this ‘indisputable’ hate speech from interactional meanings and patterns that can be analysed as being less clear instantiations of hate speech – or not hate speech at all – depending on the different levels of context.