Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 253

president) to more specific and elaborate ones: spero che un giorno quando creperete tutti
letta renzi boldrini monti napolitano ect ect quello che state facendo un giorno ne dovrete
rispondere a qualcuno e non ci sara movimento politico o inciuci a cui potrete (I hope that
someday when you all kick the bucket letta renzi boldrini monti napolitano and so on and
so forth what you are doing someday you will have to answer for to someone and there will
be no political movement or bargain you will be able to [resort to]).
Here the starting verb spero (I hope) makes the sentence an expression of desire, that
is, an optative communicative act; and the propositional content is some punishment or
revenge against the target. Hence, it is a true curse.

13.5.10 Bad Words

Our corpus is full of bad words that often also combine with all the foregoing communica-
tive acts, enhancing their aggressive impact.
As can be seen, the sorts of aggressive communication found in our corpus, and
their respective linguistic forms, are in large part the same as hypothesized earlier:
direct and indirect insults and criticism, and curses. Further acts include aggressive
requests and prohibitions, addressed to the target, and aggressive instigation,
addressed to some audience against the target. The only type of communicative act
that is not present is imprecation: a further demonstration of its being a somehow
“egocentric” act, in which an external third entity is called for, different from the
audience, and the target of aggression is only indirectly implied.

13.6 Conclusion

This chapter has defined the notion of insult, distinguishing it from other forms
of aggressive communication like bad words, curses, and imprecations. While bad
words are single words and are aggressive only because they convey taboo contents,
the other three are whole communicative acts: a curse, one wishing a bad event
or ordering a self-defeating action to a target, and further rejecting any ties with
him; an imprecation is a curse or an insult to an object or external entity to which
one assigns responsibility for an unlucky event. An insult is a communicative act
that assigns such negative properties to a target as to finally include him in a
degrading category, with the intent of offending him and spoiling his image and self-
image. As tested on a corpus of interactions in TV debates and social media, these
forms of aggressive communication often combine but yet can be distinguished
from one another; and insults may be performed directly or indirectly, by both
verbal and bodily signals. Obviously, in a situation of conflict, insults, especially
direct ones, can have deleterious and irremediable effects. Yet, further studies could
investigate the role of context and culture in making insults more or less offensive
in relation, for example, to their indirectness. Some recent studies have shown the
different forms of “rebuffering” in relation to different cultures (Lee et al. 2012 ).