Abstract
The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the linguistic concept of implicit offensiveness. On the one hand, implicitness will be juxtaposed with indirectness as the two concepts are not conceived of here as synonymous. On the other hand, a typology of offensiveness (vs offensive language and vs offendedness) will be proposed, as well as the overarching term ‘covert meaning’ that will span figurative implicitness and non-figurative implicitness. The gradability of various forms of covert meaning and its overlap with overt meaning (subsuming explicit literal meaning and implicit literal meaning) will also be discussed. In the analysis, two sample implicit concepts will be examined (irony vs sarcasm) based on corpus data (of general English and dedicated offensiveness corpus) and using non-contextual embeddings. Theory-wise, the paper demonstrates that implicitness is a complex term which is fuzzy and gradable; methodology-wise, it shows how computational tools can be used to attest theoretical assumptions related to offensive covert terms.
About the author
Anna Bączkowska, Dr Habil. Prof. UG, holds MA in English Philology, which she received from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, as well as PhD in linguistics and D.Litt. in English Linguistics, which she received from the University of Lodz. Her research interests revolve around translation studies (film subtitles), cognitive semantics, corpus and computational linguistics, and discourse studies (media discourse). She has guest lectures in Italy, Spain, Portugal, UK, Norway, Kazakhstan and Slovakia, and she has also conducted her research during her scientific stays in Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Austria and Luxembourg.
References
Ariel, Mira. 2002. The demise of a unique concept of literal meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 34. 361–402.10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00043-1Search in Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 1987. Thought and Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 1994a. Semantic Slack: What is Said and More. In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, 267–291. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 1994b. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9. 124–162.10.1111/j.1468-0017.1994.tb00220.xSearch in Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 1999. The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy 22. 327–366.10.1023/A:1005466020243Search in Google Scholar
Bączkowska, Anna. 2019. Funkcjonalna analiza zbitek leksykalnych w dyskursie medycznym. Conversatoria Linguistica XII. 7–24.Search in Google Scholar
Bączkowska, Anna. 2021.“You’re too thick to change the station” – Impoliteness, insults and responses to insults on Twitter. Topics in Linguistics 22(2). 62–84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2021-0011.10.2478/topling-2021-0011Search in Google Scholar
Bączkowska, Anna. 2022. Explicit and implicit offensiveness in dialogical film discourse in Bridgit Jones films. International Review of Pragmatics 14(2). 198–225.10.1163/18773109-01402003Search in Google Scholar
Bączkowska, Anna, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Slavko Žitnik, Chaya Liebeskind, Giedre Oleskeviciene Valunaite & Marcin Trojszczak. 2022. Implicit offensive language taxonomy and its application to automatic extraction and ontology. Paper presented at LLOD Approaches to Language Data Research and Management, Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, 21–22 September.Search in Google Scholar
Benikova, Darina, Michael Wojatzki & Torsten Zesch. (2018). What does this imply? Examining the impact of implicitness on the perception of hate speech. In Georg Rehm & Thierry Declerck (eds.): Language Technologies for the Challenges of the Digital Age, GSCL 2017, 171–179. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73706-5_1.10.1007/978-3-319-73706-5_14Search in Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. Indirectness and Politeness in Requests: Same or Different? Journal of Pragmatics 11(2). 131–146.10.1016/0378-2166(87)90192-5Search in Google Scholar
Bousfield, Derek. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.167Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511813085Search in Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 1988. Implicature, Explicature and Truth-theoretic Semantics. In Ruth M. Kempson (ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality, 155–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Croft, William & Alan D. Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511803864Search in Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25(3), 349–367.10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3Search in Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Michael Haugh. 2014. Pragmatics and the English Language. London: Palgrave.10.1007/978-1-137-39391-3Search in Google Scholar
Decock, Sofie & Ilse Depraetere. 2018. (In)directness and complaints: A reassessment. Journal of Pragmatics 132. 33–46.10.1016/j.pragma.2018.04.010Search in Google Scholar
Devitt, Michael. 2021. Overlooking Conventions. Cham: Springer.10.1007/978-3-030-70653-1Search in Google Scholar
Jay, Timothy. 1992. Cursing in America. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.57Search in Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond. 1993. Process and products in making sense of tropes. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought (2nd eds.), 252–276. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139173865.014Search in Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond & Herbert Colston. 2012. Interpreting figurative meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139168779Search in Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond & Jennifer O’Brien. 1991. Psychological aspects of irony understanding. Journal of Pragmatics 16. 523–530.10.1016/0378-2166(91)90101-3Search in Google Scholar
Giora, Raymond. 1997. Understanding Figurative and Literal Language: The Graded Salience Hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 8. 183–206. DOI:10.1515/cogl.1997.8.3.18310.1515/cogl.1997.8.3.183Search in Google Scholar
Giora, Raymond. 2003. On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195136166.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2015. “Swear words” and “curse words” in Australian (and American) English. At the crosswords of pragmatics, semantics and sociolinguistics. Intercultural Pragmatics 12(2). 189–218. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2015-0010.10.1515/ip-2015-0010Search in Google Scholar
Grainger, Karen & Sara Mills. 2016. Directness and Indirectness Across Cultures. London: Palgrave.10.1057/9781137340399Search in Google Scholar
Grice, Paul H. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University PressSearch in Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael. 2014. Im/politeness Implicatures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110240078Search in Google Scholar
Kapogianni, Eleni. 2014. Differences in use and function of verbal irony between real and fictional discourse: (Mis)interpretation and irony blindness. Humor 27. 597–618.10.1515/humor-2014-0093Search in Google Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. 2017. Implicitness in the use of situation-bound utterances. In Piotr Cap & Marta Dynel (eds.), Implicitness: From Lexis to Discourse, 201–215. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.276.09kecSearch in Google Scholar
Kihara, Yuka. 2005. The mental space structure of verbal irony. Cognitive Linguistics 16(3). 513–530.10.1515/cogl.2005.16.3.513Search in Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam. 1997. I don’t believe in word senses. Computers and the Humanities 31. 91–11310.1023/A:1000583911091Search in Google Scholar
Kurzon, Dennis. 2017. Thematic silence as a speech act. In Piotr Cap & Marta Dynel (eds), Implicitness: From lexis to discourse, 217–234, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.276.10kurSearch in Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1973. The logic of politeness; or minding your p’s and q’s. In Claudia Corum, Thomas Cedric Smith-Stark & Ann Weiser (eds.), Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 292–305. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Search in Google Scholar
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Slavko Žitnik, Anna Bączkowska, Chaya Liebeskind, Jelena Mitrović & Giedre Valunaite Oleskeviciene. 2021. LOD-connected offensive language ontology and tagset enrichment. In Sara Carvalho & Renato Rocha Souza (eds.), Proceedings of the workshops and tutorials held at LDK 2021 co-located with the 3rd Language, Data and Knowledge Conference, 135–150. Zaragossa, Spain: CEUR Workshop Proceedings.Search in Google Scholar
Marti, Leyla. 2006. Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests. Journal of Pragmatics 38. 1836–1869.10.1016/j.pragma.2005.05.009Search in Google Scholar
Mikolov, Tomas, Wen-tauYih, & Geoffrey Zweig. 2013. Linguistic regularities in continuous space word representations. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2013, 746–751, Atlanta, Georgia, 9–14 June 2013.Search in Google Scholar
Östman, Jan-Ola. 1986. Pragmatics as implicitness: an analysis of question particles in Solf Swedish, with implications for the study of passive clauses and the language of persuasion . Unpublished PhD Dissertation: UC BerkeleySearch in Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. 2007. The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(4). 437–461.10.1515/IP.2007.023Search in Google Scholar
Rumelhart, David E. & James McClelland. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/5236.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Sanchez, Liliana M. & Carl Vogel. 2013. IMHO: an exploratory study of hedging in web forums. In Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference, Metz, France, 309–313. Association for Computational Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1975. Indirect speech acts. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3, Speech Acts, 59–82. New York, NY: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368811_004Search in Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Terkourafi, Marina. 2013. Re-assessing the speech act schema: twenty-first century reflections. International Review of Pragmatics 5. 197–216.10.1163/18773109-13050203Search in Google Scholar
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics. Requests, complaints and apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110885286.10.1515/9783110885286Search in Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1985. Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics 9(1–2). 145–178.10.1016/0378-2166(85)90023-2Search in Google Scholar
Yus, Francisco. 1999. Misunderstanding and implicit/explicit communication. Pragmatics (9)4. 487–517.10.1075/prag.9.4.01yusSearch in Google Scholar
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
