A Dysphemistic Approach to the Study of Textual Cyberbullying in Social Media

Abstract

Abstract The current study is a dysphemistic approach to the study of textual cyberbullying in social media. Cyberbullying became, to an extent, widespread in social media interaction. The study aims at analyzing a sample of 6oo facebook comments taken from different news agencies and websites. The study believes that cyberbullying is used in order to reach certain end. The sample of the study consists of comments for six different topics. And 100 comments were taken for each of the six topics. The model of the study is Allan and Burridge's (1991) which classifies dysphemism into eight types. The process of analysis is carried out by taking the function, that cyberbullying can achieve, into consideration. The findings of the study reveal that the three functions that reported the highest ratio of occurrence are 'showing anger', 'emphasizing something' and 'representing bad condition'.

Keywords

• cyberbullying, dysphemism, textual cyberbullying, social media