A typology of insults: A corpus-based study of Italian political debates on Twitter

Political discourse has undergone a radical change in recent decades due both to a new conception of politics as entertainment for citizens and to the use of social networks as the primary site of political debate and interaction, among other factors. One of the main linguistic characteristics of this new political discourse is the presence of linguistic elements that fulfil the pragmatic function of insulting opponents. Our study aims to establish a typology of insulting strategies in political discourse based on an analysis of a corpus of tweets by Italian politicians. Our point of departure is an encompassing notion of insult that considers its illocutionary traits and perlocutionary effects. This notion overcomes the concept of insult as epithet (such as slurs and other negatively connotated adjectives) and offers a broader perspective on textual constructions where the negatively connotated lexical elements are nouns or verbs, or where the rhetorical devices are key in fulfilling the insulting function. Therefore, three types of insults will be examined here: slurs or derogatory epithets, other insulting epithets, and rhetorical insults.