Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explain the use of insults from a relevance-theoretic perspective. To that end, our analysis takes into consideration four variables that, we believe, play a major role in how insults are produced an interpreted: (a) the conventional or innovative nature of the insult; (b) the underlying intentionality (to offend, to praise or to establish/maintain social bonding; (c) the in/correct interpretation of the insult, and (d) the addressee's reaction or lack thereof. The combination of these variables generates a twenty four case taxonomy that can account for and describe the use of insults in any given (cross)-cultural context. The proposed taxonomy will be here described and exemplified.

The landscape of impoliteness research

“…However, Culpeper (2011) presents an insult as one category of the Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 7/4/15 7:44 AM impoliteness formulae. An insult may be understood as a distinct type of speech activity encompassing remarks which invoke negative characteristics of the target, so far studied primarily in sociolinguistics (Labov 1972;Illie 2001;Evaldsson 2005;Stokoe and Edwards 2007) but more recently also in pragmatics (Mateo and Yus 2013), which is still in need of investigation in terms of impoliteness. Mateo and Yus (2013) propose that insults can perform three functions: offence, praise and social bonding.…”

“…An insult may be understood as a distinct type of speech activity encompassing remarks which invoke negative characteristics of the target, so far studied primarily in sociolinguistics (Labov 1972;Illie 2001;Evaldsson 2005;Stokoe and Edwards 2007) but more recently also in pragmatics (Mateo and Yus 2013), which is still in need of investigation in terms of impoliteness. Mateo and Yus (2013) propose that insults can perform three functions: offence, praise and social bonding. It might be observed that whilst the first one is orientated towards impoliteness, the latter two appear to serve solidarity politeness.…”

Bald-faced lies as acts of verbal aggression

“…Hence, we cannot equal verbal aggression and insults across the board. Surprisingly, there is not much genuine speech-act theoretical work on insults, so I stick to the recent works of Neu (2008), Culpeper (2011), and Mateo and Yus (2013). 15 The force of insults becomes crystal-clear when offensive words or constructions are considered.…”

“…While the promising approach of Mateo and Yus (2013) combines the relevant pragmatic parameters, a definition of insulting in speech-act theoretical terms is missing. To be in line with speech-act definitions pursued in this paper, I propose the following felicity conditions for insulting: 16 (22) Insulting Propositional content rule What is to be expressed is any proposition p or expressive meaning e functional for insulting.…”

“…As I have shown, the victim of a bald-faced lie may still be more upset since a lack of respect for the hearer is overtly demonstrated. Let us elaborate on our scenario with respect to the parameters of Mateo and Yus (2013) and the definition of insulting in (22). First of all, the utterance of Don Draper is neither a conventional nor an innovative way of insulting someone.…”