Lexicon of hate and the production of memes: a study in light of Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

This study aims to discuss the function of pejorative lexical items referring to left-wing parties and/or politicians in the creation of memes that fuel hate speech in the Brazilian political scene. To this end, it the following order: (i) identifies the lexical items that anaphorically and pejoratively recover left-wing parties and/or politicians; (ii) captures memes whose construction starts from these lexical items in focus; finally, (iii) explains the cognitive operations involved in creating memes, taking into account the inputs coming from pejorative lexical items referring to left-wing parties and/or politicians. As a theoretical orientation, this study brings together works on Hate Speech (Schäfer, Leivas and Santos, 2015), Memification of Hate (Solano, 2018), Cognitive Linguistics (Chiavegatto, 2009; Salomão, 1999; Miranda, 1999), Semantics of Frames (Filmore, 1977; Ferrari, 2013); Lexicon (Antunes, 2012; Laroca, 2003) and Meme (Marcuschi, 2002, 2008; Costa, 2005; Candido; Gomes, 2015). As methodological guidance, the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Sardinha, 2000) are adopted. The data for compiling the corpus are extracted from the work O País dos Petralhas (Azevedo, 2008). The results point to the POLÍTICA Macroframe as guiding the corpus. To construct hate speech, one of the strategies found was the creation of neologisms to identify Left-wing political agents. In order of frequency, we have: petralha, esquerdopata, petralhantra, petralhotário, petralhada, esquerdofrênico, esquerdiota. For the production of memes, the terms petralha e esquerdopata stand out on the Internet. It is worth noting that both hate speech and the hate memification process start from the linguistic sign, therefore, studies of human language play a fundamental role in the identification and functioning of these strategies. Therefore, we need to be attentive, in order to defend a safer public arena for everyone.