Studying soft hate speech online: Synthesising approaches from multimodality research and argumentation theory

In this chapter, we analyse the reasoning that underlies implicit forms of hate speech in online communication. Focusing particularly on the multimodal complexity of particular news items, we aim to identify soft manifestations of hate speech in visual-verbal combinations. To achieve this aim, we provide an integrative, multi-layered approach that includes analytical tools from both multimodality studies and argumentation theory. This helps us to build a semantic representation of the multimodal artefact, interpreting this semantic representation with regard to the aim of delimiting contextual ambiguity, and, finally, showcasing the argumentative structure of the news item to make the inferential reasoning explicit.