Analysis of political tweets and elements of violent communication in the context of comments on immigrant issues

The study is interested in the linguistic means used to express, directly or indirectly, discrimination against vulnerable social groups, with a particular focus on immigrants. It also aims to evaluate content related to migration issues. The Janes TwePO corpus (accessible via https://www. clarin.si/ske/#dashboard?corpname=janes_twepo) will be subjected to a detailed examination, with a particular focus on the linguistic means used in individual tweets to convey negative evaluations. This analysis will be conducted using keywords related to immigrants and migration. In this analysis, I focus on expressions of linguistic intensity, namely the intensifiers and mitigators, at the lexical and syntactic level. Upon examination of the tweets, it becomes evident that both linguistic and pragmatic patterns of violent communication are prevalent, particularly when commenting on content pertaining to current affairs and expressing discriminatory attitudes in a direct or indirect manner. The perlocutionary effect of these speech acts on individuals, social groups and the public in general is reflected in the intensification of stereotypes and prejudices, as well as the generalisation and polarisation of society into ‚us‘ and ‚them‘.