The Language of Cyberbullying: Forms and Mechanisms of Online Prejudice and Discrimination in Annotated Comparable Corpora of Portuguese and English

NETLANG is an academic project based at the University of Minho, in Braga, Portugal, and is sponsored by FCT (Foundation for Science and Tecnhology), as of 1 October 2018. The project’s research problem is online hate speech, that is, the expression of prejudice and discrimination on the Internet, involving communicative situations. The problem raises two broad research questions: (i) what forms and mechanisms hate speech assumes; (ii) how, or if, these forms and mechanisms vary according to the targets involved. The answer to the first question will allow us to identify the linguistic (morpho-syntactic, lexico-semantic) properties of the texts, as well as the discursive-pragmatic features of the expression of hate and prejudice in cyberspace. The answer to the second question will allow us to draw a study of sociolinguistic variation against a continuum of identity factors, such as gender, age, ethnicity, social class and nationality, among others. Both questions must be answered by crossing the sociological profiles of the discoursal targets with the linguistic patterns of the interlocutors' online written speech.