Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 247

of the target, what characterizes him the most. This is why cases 2b and 3 are more
serious insults than 1 and 2a, and 3 is definitely the most serious of all: here the
sender summons the other, and requests his attention, by calling him by that noun
and making it his name. This makes it the most aggressive - and most prototypical -
form of insult.

13.4.1.2 Syntactic Aspects

When an insult is not phrased as a vocative (case 3) but as an informative sentence,
the negative property or degrading category must be asserted, not only presupposed.
Therefore, it must be mentioned in the main clause, not in a subordinate or relative
clause, or in a modifier.
For example, 2 a sentence like
(12) Renzi tells lies, and Di Maio destroys them

is a direct insult, while
(13) Di Maio demolisce le balle di Renzi
(Di Maio destroys Renzi's lies)
is more indirect because Renzi's lying is only implied, not directly stated.

Further, when the negative property is stated as an adjective, it must be used with
a predicative function, not simply an attributive one.

In a comment about Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo says:

(14) Tre avvocati milanesi hanno brutte notizie per il condannato Renzi .
(Three attorneys from Milan have bad news for the condemned Renzi)
Here the negative property is given by an adjective with an attributive function.
If Grillo had said:
(15) Renzi, sei un cittadino condannato
(Renzi, you are a condemned citizen)
this would have been a direct insult; but the way it is phrased in (14) is only
indirectly insulting because the adjective condannato (condemned) is used with
an attributive function (as marked in Italian by the adjective preceding the noun),
hence it is presupposed, not asserted, information. Thus, this sentence can in fact
be considered an insult, but only an indirect one.

2 Our verbal examples are mostly taken from the corpus of D'Errico et al. ( 2014 ), drawn from the
blog and Facebook page of Beppe Grillo, the head of the Italian political movement Movimento 5
Stelle. The examples in italics are real.