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Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First Articles

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Fragile men and fishy arguments

Attributing and disputing offence in online interaction

ORCiD logo with link | University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
ORCiD logo with link | University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
ORCiD logo with link | University of Kent, United Kingdom
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of East Anglia.

Published online: 3 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00147.bax
Abstract
What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask on what grounds a speaker can be labelled as offended, even when the speaker does not claim any feelings of offence, as well as to what extent a speaker can deny being offended, when appearing to, indeed, be offended. We present a case study of an interaction from Twitter (X) stemming from an instance of failed humour, exploring the linguistic cues that people rely on when judging others to be offended. We find that disputes regarding offence are not actually necessarily to do with one’s feelings at all but instead relate to whether someone’s emotional involvement is perceived to be a barrier to their objectivity and argumentative strength.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Offence and offence-taking
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Linguistic evidence for offence-taking: Moral and affective stances
  • 5.Alternative assessments: The fuzzy nature of metapragmatic terms and strategic denial
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (55)
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