scholarly journals “You’re too thick to change the station” – Impoliteness, insults and responses to insults on Twitter

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-84
Author(s):  
Anna Bączkowska

Abstract This paper aims to propose a typology of replies to insults based on data retrieved from Twitter, which is ripe with offensive comments. The proposed typology is embedded in the theory of impoliteness, and it hinges on the notion of the perlocutionary effect. It assumes that what counts as an insult depends primarily on whether or not an utterance is evaluated as offensive by the insultee. The evaluation can be signalled behaviourally or verbally and includes expressed replies as well as so-called silent replies. The insults, regardless of the presence or absence of an insulting intention of the insulter (potential insult), that are not rendered as offensive by the target are only attempted insults, while those that are experienced as offensive amount to genuine insults. The analysis has illustrated select types of reactions and has shown that potential, attempted and genuine insults may be further divided into: in/direct insults, explicit/implicit, non-/pure, and non-/vocatives, whilst reactions can be subsumed by three overarching strategies: agreeing, attacking and rejection.

Author(s):  
Elisabeth Camp

Slurs are incendiary terms—many deny that sentences containing them can ever be true. And utterances where they occur embedded within normally “quarantining” contexts, like conditionals and indirect reports, can still seem offensive. At the same time, others find that sentences containing slurs can be true; and there are clear cases where embedding does inoculate a speaker from the slur’s offensiveness. This chapter argues that four standard accounts of the “other” element that differentiates slurs from their more neutral counterparts—semantic content, perlocutionary effect, presupposition, and conventional implicature—all fail to account for this puzzling mixture of intuitions. Instead, it proposes that slurs make two distinct, coordinated contributions to a sentence’s conventional communicative role.


Author(s):  
Mutiara Shasqia ◽  
Aulia Anggraini

Teachers and lecturers alike understand that they must consciously use a variety of speech acts to force students to follow their instructions and be motivated to learn on their own. This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the notion of the perlocutionary effect of university students in the classroom resulted from lecturers’ illocutionary acts. The acts were then analyzed the illocutionary act of the lecturers’ talk or speech during specific time using Austin’s speech act theory. This present study built its investigation from data collection on both lecturers and university students through interview and field notes. This study manage to reveals that lecturers freely use speech acts of persuading, angering, and commanding. This study believes that illocutionary acts will still have happened in our interaction's life or communication in many-many context including classroom interaction between lecturer-students communication context.


Author(s):  
M. І. Hordiichuk

The article studies the concept of “fake news,” focusing on researching its etymology and the scope of its meaning. The meaning of the concept of “fake news” is studied based on the contrast with the word combination“false news”. The coinages “post-truth” and “fake news” have been recognized as the words of the year by different dictionaries in the recent years, which contributes to the image of the present-day media. Various definitions of fake news of different scholars were analyzed. It was found that fake news are relatively easy in making and spreading due to the advancement of modern technologies. However, they disrupt the faith of readers in media, which stands for the need for the detection of fake news in mass media. Consequently, the detection of fake news has been acknowledged as a crucial skill in the modern era. The paper analyzes the ways communicative theory can be used in the detection of fake news in the media. Four main strategies were identified, namely argumentative, appellative, evaluative, and the strategy of optimizing of perlocutionary effect. Each of the strategies is applied in various ways in fake news making with the use of appropriate tactics within their scope. The argumentative strategy operates with the tactics of manipulation and detalization. Tactics of ideologization, appeal to addressees’ needs and retrospection are used within the appellative strategy. Evaluative strategy includes the tactics of positioning, discrediting the opponent and distancing. And within the strategy of optimizing of perlocutionary effect the tactics of emotion evocation, mnemonization and visualization are identified. The paper provides a theoretical background to all of these strategies. Also, their practical application in the media was analyzed based on the examples taken from the independent fact-checking organization “StopFake”. It was found that all of them are frequently used in the hybrid war against Ukraine to disrupt its official government, treaties with European partners, and provoke chaos within the state.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 00068
Author(s):  
Olga Krapivkina ◽  
Kseniya Kolesnikova ◽  
Irina Borisovskaya ◽  
Elena Taranova

The article analyses the role of the addressee as a factor determining discourses of legal professionals. The important role of this factor makes it necessary to account for the effect of the addressee on discourse production, identify linguistic and cognitive mechanisms optimizing communicative interaction of the addresser and the addressee in the courtroom. The focus on the addressee, addressee’s phenomenological experience and knowledge makes legal discursive practices dialogical, and intensifies their interactive characteristics. Special attention is paid to the linguistic cognitive mechanism “transition from the term to the notion” which allows for formation of the shared interpretation context when professionals interact with lay persons in the courtroom setting. Clarity of judicial speeches depends on the ability of the speaker to switch from the professional code to the language of lay people, define legal terms through lay concepts. The novelty of the research is due to the choice of the research trajectory which is based on the issue of the addressee for producing courtroom discourses. The article concludes that the perlocutionary effect of the communication depends on the ability of the speaker to accommodate to lay participants, to the knowledge and expectations of the lay audience.


Dialogue ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Páll S. Árdal

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible the speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation.


Disputatio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (28) ◽  
pp. 309-315
Author(s):  
Jukka Mikkonen

Abstract In her study Fiction and Imagination: The Anthropological Function of Literature (2000), Margit Sutrop criticizes Gregory Currie’s theory of fiction-making, as presented in The Nature of Fiction(1990), for using an inappropriate conception of the author’s ‘fictive intention.’ As Sutrop sees it, Currie is mistaken in reducing the author’s fictive intention to that of achieving a certain response in the audience. In this paper, I shall discuss Sutrop’s theory of fiction-making and argue that although her view is insightful in distinguishing the illocutionary effect and the perlocutionary effect in the author’s fictive intention, there are flaws in it. My aim is to show that, first, Sutrop’s critique of Currie’s view is misguided and, second, her own definition of fiction as the author’s expression of her imagination is problematic in not distinguishing literary fiction-making from other discursive functions and in dismissing the literary practice which regulates the production of literary fictions.


Author(s):  
Zhanna Nikonova ◽  
◽  
Ekaterina Soloveva ◽  

The article analyzes fake news texts from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and its key concept, speech act theory. The specificity of fake news lies in the fact that, while ontologically functioning as a carrier of factual information, this type of text contains intentionally false information deliberately presented as real facts, often rendered provocative. Linguistic study of the fake news phenomenon is especially relevant since there is a clear demand for effective tools that would help disclose fake news texts, understand their nature, and describe functional features of such texts in political communication. Analyzing the modern German political discourse, the authors identify a trend of using fake news texts to vilify and destroy the authority and reputation of certain political forces and describe a number of key features of fake news texts. The article outlines issues related to the linguistic study and verification of fake news texts with the hope to develop reliable models for describing this text type and to develop practical guidelines that would enable users to detect fake news in discourse. The study justifies the high explanatory potential of the speech act theory which offers objective means to examine the manipulation mechanism in fake news texts in terms of the illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect of an utterance. The analysis of the illocutionary struc-ture of fake news messages leads to the conclusion that false propositional content in conjunction with the constitutive rules of the illocution “statement” of the text type “news” is conditional on the high perlocutionary effect of fake news in the modern German political discourse. The article evaluates the prospects of studying fake news texts from within the paradigm of the speech act theory and links them to identifying linguistic markers of deliberate distortion of the true propositional content.


Author(s):  
A. P. Kryachkova

RETRACTEDThe main definitions of political discourse are introduced in this article. The author also suggests her own definition of this term. The participants of political discourse use various communicative strategies in order to influence opponents. The article reviews various definitions of communicative strategy term. The author gives her own definition of communicative strategy term and describes the main political discourse strategies. The purpose of the article is to review defamation strategy implementation and to identify its role in political discourse of Germany based on Bundestag's political wrangling. The author describes the main tactics and conversational turns of defamation strategy and its development in German politicians' speech image. Defamation strategy is one of the leading strategies in any aggressive verbal behavior discourse. The research describes main communicant's intentions by using of defamation strategy. The addresser uses this kind of strategy to offend the opponent's positive image aiming to undermine opponent's credibility and to reduce his significance at the political stage. There are following tactics of defamation strategy: offence, accusation, jeer. The article reviews the functioning of named tactics in political discourse of Germany. The article describes special aspects of above listed tactics, distinguishes terms of offence and accusation, gives examples from Bundestag's political speeches. Every tactic has its conversational turns, that are realized by various linguistic means. The article analyses political comments as an evaluative lexis subject. It also suggests analysis of such turns as intensification, comment's metaphoricity, comparative constractions, that promote better perlocutionary effect.


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