Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 244

explicitly to the target or an audience, with the further goal of offending the target.
As in imperative curses, here the relationship is not mediated by some third entity
but is only between the sender and the target, who may (or even must) also be the
addressee; yet the content of the communicative goal is not an action -as in curses -
but a negative evaluation of the target.
As for the emotions expressed or communicated, an insult is a communication
of disesteem and lack of respect toward the target; in a sense, as argued by other
authors (Vogel 2015 ) it is connected to disgust; but disgust for objects becomes
contempt when addressed to a person. Moreover, while in imprecations the emotion
of anger may be simply expressed as a spontaneous way to give vent to the sender's
feelings, in an insult the sender deliberately aims at communicating his disgust and
contempt to the target. Sender S not only communicates to T that he has a low image
of T, but also meta-communicates that he communicates this to T because he has the
deliberate intention of offending T. And this is further degreading for T, because if
someone defies you without fearing retaliation, he must believe you to be someone
with very little power (Castelfranchi 1988 ).
Therefore, in insulting, Sender S

1. Has the goal of offending T, i.e., letting T know that S has an image of T as
belonging to a category that is degrading for T, hence as being entitled to an
image lower than the one T pretends to belong to;
2. Has the goal of communicating that S intends to offend T and that he does not
fear T's retaliation, which is in itself offensive since it diminishes T's image of
power, finally, through this; and
3. Has the goal of attacking T's self-image, thereby causing him to lose face before
himself, in addition to before others.

Of course, all this is even more offensive and face-threatening if done publicly,
that is, if the attribution of a lower image is publicly displayed in front of an
audience, in other words, when not (only) the target but the audience is also
addressed.
Table 13.1 summarizes the differences among bad words, imprecations, curses,
and insults.

13.4 Verbal and Bodily Direct and Indirect Insults

The communicative act of an insult may be performed with both verbal and bodily
signals and can be both direct and indirect, according to whether the insulting
content is explicitly stated by the literal meaning of the communicative act - for
instance by the insulting meaning of the words used or by a syntactic construction
peculiar to insults - or else it must be caught by inference from an apparently
noninsulting meaning. Therefore, to distinguish indirect insults implies clearly
determining the canonical pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic forms of direct ones.
Let us start from the linguistic form of direct insults.