Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 246

13.4.1 Verbal Direct Insults

An insult is an informative act or a vocative by which the sender assigns a very
negative property to the target or includes the target in a degrading category. In its
most typical cases, the insult may take the following linguistic forms:

1. An informative sentence like “You are X” ( you are idiotic ), where X is an
adjective conveying the negative property.
2. An informative sentence like “You are an X,” where X is

(a) either a nominalized adjective ( you are an idiot ) conveying the negative
property;
(b) or a noun ( you are an animal ) conveying the degrading category.

3. An adjective or a noun used as a vocative “You X!”, that is, used to summon the
target ( idiot! ).

13.4.1.1 Semantic Aspects

To understand the different import of these forms of insult, we must go back to
the meaning and function of nouns. A noun is a word that names a category of
entities and contains in its meaning all the distinctive properties that characterize
all the entities in that category as being similar to each other and different from
entities of other categories. Therefore, when naming someone or something by a
noun, one assigns to it all the defining properties of that category. But among these
properties one or more may be subject to a negative evaluation, or the very fact of
being assigned to that category might even rule out some desired positive evaluation.
An example is the noun “ capra ” (goat), launched as an insult by Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian
art critic and politician, to attack a female opponent during a talk show. 1 The category of
goat is defined, among others, by the property “ NOT INTELLIGENT ,” so the very fact of
being assigned to that category implies being stigmatized with this property. But more than
that, the category of goat is considered (also from being not intelligent) as a lower category
than that of person.

All the aforementioned cases assign a negative evaluation to T, but 1 and 2a do
this only, and do so directly, while 2b and 3 assign T a negative property indirectly,
by inserting him into a “degrading category”: a category of entities seen as definitely
inferior to one T pretends to belong to - an animal, an inanimate object, a person
of a lower class or race. Therefore, among those cases, insults n.1 and n.2a, where
the property is conveyed by an adjective, simply assign to T a negative property,
which may be one negative property among others, not necessarily permanent, or
characterizing T as such. In cases 2b and 3, however, the mentioned property, being
phrased as a noun, becomes not only one among many but the one defining feature

1 All our examples are taken from communicative acts by, toward, or between Italian politicians.