Abstract
This study intends to contribute to the delimitation of selected offensive language categories based on an analysis of a corpus of contributions to discussion forums in Czech online national newspapers and news platforms called Czech Corpus of Offensive Language (CCOL). It endeavours to study three problematic areas (1) delimitation between the speech acts performed, (ii) lexical realisation of specific properties of the target and (iii) identification and categorisation of implicit offence (e.g. figurative semantic shifts) by exploring contextual cues for the speech act identification, the keywords indicating the properties of the target and the types of semantic shifts in implicit expressions of offence. The findings indicate that annotation systems that do not use context information for the detection of offensive language may face problems with adequate interpretation of the language means under investigation.
About the authors
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research interests include English for academic and specific purposes and political discourse. She has published the books Analysing Genre: The Colony Text of UNESCO Resolutions (2009), Coherence in Political Speeches (2011) and co-authored Persuasion in Specialised Discourses (2020). She is co-editor of the journal Discourse and Interaction.
Renata Povolná is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research lies in the area of discourse analysis, pragmatics and conversation analysis. She has published the books Spatial and Temporal Adverbials in English Authentic Face-to-Face Conversation (2003), Interactive Discourse Markers in Spoken English (2010) and co-authored Persuasion in Specialised Discourses (2020). She is co-editor of the journal Discourse and Interaction.
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