[Lingtyp] Grammatical marking of insults (?)

[Jussi Ylikoski]

Dear Riccardo and all,

D’Avis and Meibauer's paper "Du Idiot! Din idiot! Pseudo-vocative constructions and insults in German (and Swedish)" (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110304176.189/html) might be of interest; see also the thirty studies referring to this paper according to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9645899484374998601 (and so forth).

Best regards,

Jussi


________________________________
Frá: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> fyrir hönd Sebastian Nordhoff <sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de>
Sent: þriðjudagur, 14. desember 2021 22:50
Til: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Efni: Re: [Lingtyp] Grammatical marking of insults (?)

Dear Riccardo,
Sinhala has several levels of politeness in imperatives (marked by
affixes), one of which would be rendered as "Do X, you $#!% !!!". I once
nearly got beaten up when underestimating the impact that the use of
this form can have. I can look up the reference if you want to.
Best wishes
Sebastian

On 12/14/21 19:49, Riccardo Giomi wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> A student of mine would like to investigate the linguistic coding of
> insults across languages. She is particularly interested in finding out
> whether languages can have dedicated (uses of) grammatical
> forms/constructions for this specific purpose. The best example I could
> come up with so far is the use of the Portuguese third person reflexive
> possessive adjective (determiner in Brazilian Portuguese) /seu/sua/ with
> epithets which are meant as insults. An example would be
>
> /Cala=te, seu burro!/
> shut.up.IMP.2.SG <http://shut.up.IMP.2.SG>=2.SG.OBJ 3.SG.REFL.POSS
> donkey.M.SG <http://donkey.M.SG>
> 'Shut up, you idiot!'
>
> (Where, funnily enough, the third person of the adjective/determiner is
> presumably the polite form!) This is an interesting case, I think,
> because as far as I can see you never use /seu/sua /in 'plain'
> vocatives, nor with terms of endearment, nor, for that matter, with NPs
> which are not used as invocations.
>
> I am wondering whether anyone is aware of a language which has some
> grammaticalized form or construction that can be used in this specific
> way. Note that I am not interested in, say, abusive pronouns or
> honorifics or general expressions of the speaker's disappointment
> ('frustrative' markers) but only in grammaticalized means of marking the
> speech act as an insult.
>
> Many thanks in advance and best wishes to all,
> Riccardo
>
> --
> Riccardo Giomi, Ph.D.
> University of Liège
> Département de langues modernes : linguistique, littérature et traduction
> Research group /Linguistique contrastive et typologie des langues/
> F.R.S.-FNRS Postdoctoral fellow (CR - FC 43095)
> //
>
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