Double speech act: Negotiating inter-cultural beliefs and intra-cultural hate speech

Abstract

This study investigates attitudes towards discriminatory speech among a sample of Greek Cypriot youth and aims to identify motivators/factors that might produce hateful attitudes. Questionnaires and face-to-face interviews are explored with corpus linguistics tools, and discourse analysis is used to evaluate the sample's intra-cultural attitude towards hate speech as well as the differences and commonalities in beliefs and attitudes towards the Other and the Self. We focus on the respective roles of salience (Giora, 2003) and common ground (Kecskes & Zhang, 2009) to explain the internal dialogue that is witnessed during the interviews. Intra-cultural beliefs and attitudes that incline to rejecting out-groups seem to be confronted with the pressure of external calls for acceptance that characterize the European discourse. This negotiated positioning of the participants is externalized in what we have called ‘a double act stance’.