Unveiling the rationale of soft hate speech in multimodal artefacts

Abstract

This article sets out to outline a methodological framework that enables us to unravel the underlying reasoning of covert hatred (i.e. soft hate speech), through an examination of the ways in which this is realised and, moreover, argumentatively justified in multimodal artefacts of the mainstream press. It focuses on a controversial case study – the release of the Italian hostage Silvia Romano – and how it was covered on the front pages of two right-wing Italian newspapers. It draws on the premises of multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS), proposing a micro-level cross-fertilisation of a social semiotic discourse–analytical perspective for the analysis of multimodal meaning(s), realised on newspaper front pages, with the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT), which focuses on the analysis of argumentative inferences that stem from multimodal representational meaning(s).