Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 239

Curses, imprecations, and insults are whole communicative acts. Bad words,
in contrast, are single words, conveying only a part of a communicative act - for
instance, a noun like shit , an adjective like idiot (which can well be used as an
insult, but only given certain conditions), a verb like fuck or damn , a noun phrase
like the hell - that all convey meanings subject to communicative taboo.
2. Antecedents: facts and emotions
Curses, imprecations, insults, and bad words also differ in the types of events
that can precede and cause them and in the emotions expressed by them and
triggered by those events.

13.3.1 Curse

A curse is a communicative act through which a sender communicates to a target
that he wants some very bad event to happen to him. This may be expressed in two
ways:

1. An imperative communicative act, by which the sender orders the target to do a
somewhat self-defeating action to himself, as in
(1) Go to hell!
(2) Fuck off!

2. An optative communicative act (Poggi 2009 ): an act in which the sender, though
addressing the target, makes appeal to a third entity - god, fate, fortune, to which
the sender attributes the power to make events occur or not - to cause a very bad
event to happen to the target, as in
(3) May you sink at sea!

Or in the biblical curse by Noah to Canaan (Genesis, 9:25):
(4) “ Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. ”

Here the sender wants something bad to happen to the target and, to express this
desire, uses a modal verb of power ( may ) in an optative mode: a typical phrasing of
an appeal to a third omnipotent entity considered as being able to fulfill the sender's
desire.
A particular kind of optative curse, so-called elliptical optative curses, are ellip-
tical with respect to verbs or nouns mentioning a curse or bad things. Expressions
like (5) in some Italian dialects
(5) La potta de to' ma'
(your mother's vagina)

or

(6) L'anima de li mortacci tua
(the soul of your dead ancestors)