Provocative Insinuations as Hate Speech: Argumentative Functions of Mentioning Ethnicity in Headlines

Abstract

We explore a particular type of propagandistic message, which we call “provocative insinuation”. For example: ‘Iraqi refugee is convicted in Germany of raping and murdering teenage girl’. Although this sentence seems to merely report a fact, it also conveys a potentially hateful message about Iraqi refugees. We look at the argumentative roles that these utterances play in public discourse. Specifically, we argue that they implicitly address the question of the integration of refugees and migrants, and in fact aim to tilt the audience against these groups by strongly inviting hearers to make generalisations based on “striking” properties. We examine different strategies to counteract the conveyed hateful message.