Hate speech in non-cooperative contexts: question types as a measure of cooperativity

Research on hate speech has identified various aspects of social media that affect the speaker’s attitude in this specific type of communication. In this chapter we discuss some structural aspects of the context of utterance as analysed in dynamic pragmatics, and we show that with respect to these, certain online contexts qualify as inherently non-cooperative; we hypothesise that non-cooperativity favours the emergence of excessive language and, in particular, of hate speech. To test our hypothesis, we analyse three small corpora of discussion threads from two different social platforms. We propose that different types of canonical and non-canonical questions are indices of (non-)cooperativity, and we analyse their distribution in each discussion thread.