The emergence of social networks has provided entire categories of people with the right to express themselves, overcoming the invisibility they once experienced and laying the ground- work for a democratic transition of thought and speech. However, it has also brought about the onset of the stigma which associates the web with a high rate of daily conflict. This work aims to explore one of the speech acts designed to generate tension among users: the insult. Specifically, we intend to analyze the linguistic intensification processes used by speakers to increase the illocutionary force of their insults. The goal is to investigate the intensification phenomenon of insults in computer-mediated com- munication2, which is characterized by a mix of creative communication tools, languages, and forms, as well as paraverbal devices. Our analysis of a corpus of about 1140 insults extracted from social networks reveals that most of them show intensification phenomena. Therefore, it appears that users make optimal use of all available linguistic and paralinguistic strategies to intensify the meaning of insults, some of which are exclusive to the digital medium.
I meccanismi di intensificazione dell’insulto nella comunicazione mediata dal computer
Giovanni Vinciguerra
2023-01-01
Abstract
The emergence of social networks has provided entire categories of people with the right to express themselves, overcoming the invisibility they once experienced and laying the ground- work for a democratic transition of thought and speech. However, it has also brought about the onset of the stigma which associates the web with a high rate of daily conflict. This work aims to explore one of the speech acts designed to generate tension among users: the insult. Specifically, we intend to analyze the linguistic intensification processes used by speakers to increase the illocutionary force of their insults. The goal is to investigate the intensification phenomenon of insults in computer-mediated com- munication2, which is characterized by a mix of creative communication tools, languages, and forms, as well as paraverbal devices. Our analysis of a corpus of about 1140 insults extracted from social networks reveals that most of them show intensification phenomena. Therefore, it appears that users make optimal use of all available linguistic and paralinguistic strategies to intensify the meaning of insults, some of which are exclusive to the digital medium.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
