Differentiated Analysis of the «Insult» Speech Genrebased on Messages from a Social Network Internet Sites

Abstract

The study of Internet mediated speech communication seems relevant due to the dynamic development of the Internet language, the lack of its codification and legal regulation, duplication of social practices and processes in the virtual environment. The present research is focused on one of the conflicting speech genres (speech acts), which is frequent within Internet communication. Speech actions in the genre of insult in some cases acquire illegal actions and are considered from the standpoint of law enforcement in the practice of forensic linguistics. The novelty of this study lies in the differentiated approach to insults as applied not only to the binary division of its interpretation within the ordinary logic and legal grounds, but also to the study of the distinctive characteristics of this phenomenon in refraction to various legal interpretations (in the criminal, civil, administrative codes). We analyzed written messages of Russian-speaking users of the social network site VKontakte, which were considered through the prism of the provisions of Article 5.61 Insult of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation. In the course of the study, it was revealed that even within a specialized dataset of messages, perceived by the recipients as insulting messages, the share of messages corresponding to the criterion basis of insult (Article 5.61) is negligible.

Keywords

• pragmatics
• corpus linguistics
• linguistic expertise
• insult
• speech genre
• speech act
• internet communication
• social network site
• internet language