Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 11:1 (2023) ► pp.101–120

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Slang and verbal aggression

A morphopragmatic analysis of the compound families X-ass, X-brain, X-face, and X-head

ORCiD logo with link | University of Pisa
Published online: 2 March 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00074.mat
Abstract
While lexical and discourse strategies of hate speech have widely been studied hitherto, there is limited research devoted to the contribution of grammatical and morphological aspects to verbal aggression. This paper provides a corpus-assisted analysis of slang morphological means used in verbal aggression. The focus is on four compound families (X-ass, X-brain, X-face, X-head), which are often used in slang to form compound words referring to specific groups, such as homosexuals, fools, or ineffectual people. The paper adopts a morphopragmatic approach to investigate three pragmatic meanings/functions – namely, derisive, critical, and offensive – of slang words in situations of conflict. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of data drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows the frequency of the morphological processes, their privileged genres and contexts, as well as their negative potential and face-threatening power.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Methodology and data
  • 4.Compound constituents, combining forms, and affixoids
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Quantitative analysis
      • 5.1.1The constituent -ass
      • 5.1.2The constituent -brain
      • 5.1.3The constituent -face
      • 5.1.4The constituent -head
    • 5.2Qualitative analysis
      • 5.2.1Derisive function
      • 5.2.2Critical function
      • 5.2.3Offensive function
  • 6.General discussion and concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (44)
References
Allen, Irwing L. 1998. “Slang: Sociology.” In Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, ed. by Jacob L. Mey, and R. E. Asher, 878–883. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Amiot, Dany, and Edwige Dugas. 2021. Combining Forms and Affixoids in Morphology. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Morphology, ed. by Rochelle Lieber. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at [URL]
Andersson, Lars G., and Peter Trudgill. 1990. Bad Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2017. Compounds and Compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla, Claudia Caffi, and Marina Sbisà. 1991. “Scalar Dimensions in Illocutionary Force.” In Speech Acts: Fiction or Reality?, ed. by Igor Ž. Žagar, 63–76. Ljubljana: Institute for Social Sciences.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Booij, Geert E., and Matthias Hüning. 2014. “Affixoids and Constructional Idioms.” In Extending the Scope of Construction-based Grammar, ed. by Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman, and Gijsbert Rutten, 77–106. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caffi, Claudia. 2001. La mitigazione: un approccio pragmatico alla comunicazione nei contesti terapeutici. Munster: Lit.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cantero, Mónica. 2003. La morfopragmática del español. München: LINCOM Europa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crocco Galéas, Grazia. 1992. Gli etnici italiani: Studio di morfologia naturale. Padova: Unipress.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Paul Iganski, and Abe Sweiry. 2017. “Linguistic Impoliteness and Religiously Aggravated Hate Crime in England and Wales.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5 (1): 1–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available at [URL]
Demata, Massimiliano. 2021. “Keeping the Threat out: Trump’s Discourse, the Wall and the ‘Other’.” Altre Modernità 25 (5): 270–286.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Ferenc Kiefer. 1990. “Austro-Hungarian Morphopragmatics”. In Contemporary Morphology, ed. by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Hans C. Luschützky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer, and John R. Rennison, 69–77. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Marianne Kilani-Schoch. 1994. Morphopragmatique interactionnelle: les formations en -o du français branché. In Natural Morphology – Perspectives for the Nineties, ed. by Livia Tonelli, and Wolfgang U. Dressler, 31–52. Padua: Unipress.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. 1986. “How to Fix Interfixes?” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 361: 53–68.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1987. “Elements of Morphopragmatics.” In Levels of Linguistic Adaptation, ed. by Jef Verschueren, 33–51. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German, and Other Languages. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dumas, Bethany K., and Jonathan Lighter. 1978. “Is Slang a Word for Linguistics?” American Speech 531: 5–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eble, Connie. 1996. Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students. Chapel Hill-London: The University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Erjavec, Karmen, and Melita P. Kovačič. 2012. “‘You don’t understand, this is a new war!’ Analysis of Hate Speech in News Web Sites’ Comments.” Mass Communication and Society 15 (6): 899–920. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, Jonathon. 2020. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition, [URL]
Hamilton, Mark A. 2012. “Verbal Aggression: Understanding the Psychological Antecedents and Social Consequences.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (1): 5–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z., Vahid Parvaresh, and Puyu Ning. 2019. “Morality, Moral Order, and Language Conflict and Aggression: A Position Paper.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7 (1): 6–31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilani-Schoch, Marianne, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 1992. “Prol-o, intell-o, gauch-o et les autres. Propriétés formelles de deux opérations du français parlé.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 431: 65–86. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mattiello, Elisa. 2008. An Introduction to English Slang: A Description of its Morphology, Semantics and Sociology. Monza: Polimetrica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. forth. “Language Aggression in English Slang: The Case of the -o Suffix”. In Grammar of Hate: Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse, ed. by Natalia Knoblock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mattiello, Elisa, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2018. “The Morphosemantic Transparency/Opacity of Novel English Analogical Compounds and Compound Families.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies 531: 67–114. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia. 1997. “Modification of Speech Acts: Aggravation and Mitigation.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Linguists, ed. by Bernard Caron, Electronic Edition, paper n. 0353. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. “The Pragmatics of the ‘Diminutive’ -y/ie Suffix in English.” In Naturally! Linguistic Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. by Chris Schaner-Wolles, John Rennison, and Friedrich Neubarth, 315–326. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. “Morphopragmatics.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown, 2nd edn, Volume 81: 332–335. Oxford: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia, and Wolfgang U. Dressler, 2020. “Pragmatic Explanations in Morphology.” In Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon, ed. by Vito Pirrelli, Ingo Plag, and Wolfgang U. Dressler, 405–451. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miró-Llinares, Fernando, Asier Moneva, and Miriam Esteve. 2018. “Hate is in the Air! But where? Introducing an Algorithm to Detect Hate Speech in Digital Microenvironments.” Crime Science 7 (1): 1–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munro, Pamela. ed. 2001. U.C.L.A. Slang 4. Los Angeles: Department of Linguistics, University of California.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oksanen, Atte, James Hawdon, Emma Holkeri, Matti Näsi, and Pekka Räsänen. 2014. “Exposure to Online Hate among Young Social Media Users.” In Soul of Society: A Focus on the Lives of Children and Youth, ed. by M. Nicole Warehime, 253–273. Bingley: Emerald. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scalise, Sergio. 1986. Generative Morphology. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1988. “The Notion of ‘Head’ in Morphology”. Yearbook of Morphology 11: 229–245.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita. 2000. “From Slang to Slanguage: A Description Based on Teenage Talk.” In Mi a szleng?, ed. by Tamas Kis, 89–108. Debrecen: Kossuth Lajos University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Gisle Andersen, and Ingrid K. Hasund. 2002. Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stevens, Christopher M. 2005. “Revisiting the Affixoid Debate. On the Grammaticalization of the Word.” In Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen, ed. by Torsten Leuschner, Tanja Mortelmans, and Sara de Groodt, 71–83. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tarasova, Elizaveta, and José A. Sánchez Fajardo. forth. “Adj+ie/y Nominalisations in Contemporary English: From Diminution to Pejoration.” In Grammar of Hate: Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse, ed. by Natalia Knoblock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Warren, Beatrice. 1990. “The Importance of Combining Forms.” In Contemporary Morphology, ed. by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Hans C. Luschützky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer, and John R. Rennison, 111–132. Belin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhang, Ziqi, David Robinson, and Jonathan Tepper. 2018. “Detecting Hate Speech on Twitter Using a Convolution-LSTM Based Deep Neural Network.” In The Semantic Web, ed. by Aldo Gangemi, Roberto Navigli, Maria-Esther Vidal, Pascal Hitzler, Raphaël Troncy, Laura Hollink, Anna Tordai, and Mehwish Alams, 745–760. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 10843. Springer Verlag. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Mattiello, Elisa & José A. Sánchez Fajardo
2025. The evaluative suffixoid -head and its Spanish and Italian equivalents. Folia Linguistica DOI logo
Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia
2025. 614 The pragmatics of word-formation. In Word-Formation - Semantics and Pragmatics, ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Sánchez Fajardo, José A. & Elisa Mattiello
2025. From spearhead to crackhead: Unraveling the morphosemantic development of English -head through a network of constructions. Word Structure 18:1-2 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue