Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Insults as a sentence type: A cross-linguistic perspective
- Date
- Monday 12 October 2026
- Time
- Series
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.52
Abstract
Sentence types (e.g. declarative, interrogative, imperative) are traditionally understood as the grammaticalized expression of a restricted set of direct speech acts, that is, as conventional expression formats that indicate the fundamental communicative intention of the speaker who produces the utterance, without recourse to overt lexical means. The question asked in this paper is whether there are any languages in which insults are encoded by a dedicated sentence type, that is, whether a full-fledged “insultive” illocution may ever be grammaticalized in natural languages. To test this empirically, we gathered information about 29 constructions from 23 languages, which we knew in advance to be used with derogatory purposes; we formulated three mutually independent criteria to determine whether any of these constructions qualify as a distinct insultive sentence type. Native speaker consultation formed the core of our method, complemented by grammar mining and corpus analysis. Our results demonstrate that at least seven of the constructions in our sample are exclusively used to pursue the communicative goal of insulting the addressee, thus providing evidence for the existence of the insultive as a separate grammatical illocution. The research is couched within the grammatical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008; Keizer 2015; Giomi 2023), which regards the illocution as one of the layers that make up the hierarchically organized pragmatic structure of linguistic utterances.
References
- Giomi, Riccardo. 2023. A Functional Discourse Grammar Theory of Grammaticalization. Volume 1: Functional Change. (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics 19). Brill.
- Hengeveld, Kees & J. Lachlan Mackenzie. 2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A Typologically-Based Theory of Language Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Keizer, Evelien. 2015. A Functional Discourse Grammar for English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.