Law, language and communication — the state and perspectives of research on defamation and hate speech

Abstract

The following article is intended to pursue two main objectives. The first one is a brief review of the historical and current research fields that combine legal issues and communication science and linguistics, and the prospects for development, with particular emphasis on the situation in Poland. This review is a preparation to check whether the research in legal linguistics has addressed the problems that will be presented in the second part of the text. The second aim of the text is to indicate proposals for new areas of speech research in terms of important legal concepts such as: verbal attack, “hate speech”, discredit, defamation.