This study focuses on the nominalizing and evaluative function of the -ie/y suffix with the purpose of investigating how the changes in the semantics (diminutive → pejorative) of the output units are connected to the conceptual processes that employ evaluative morphological forms. This study reports on the qualitative analysis of 63 examples of Adj+ie/y nominalizations (e.g. softie, brownie) collected from a range of descriptive dictionaries of English. The analysis of the data employs a usage-based approach to Morphopragmatics and the Conceptual Integration Theory in order to explore cognitive operations that underlie the formation of pejoratives. The findings show that with the activation of the meanings [+human] and [+adult], the concept diminution is reconfigured as ‘small/insignificant in value’, whose utmost degree is understood as pejoration. A multilevel analysis of such nominalizations indicates that these suffixed forms are affected by the aspect of bidirectionality: whilst an Adj+ie/y nominalization, such as blackie, is formally represented through the morphological concept of diminution, size → insignificant also activates through a conceptual integration process.

This collection presents a new outlook on an old problem. Studies of impoliteness, verbal aggression, hate speech, and similar phenomena have been conducted for a significant time now. They can be considered developed research areas with well-established methods, models, and their own bodies of literature. Numerous studies are in print and in progress, diverse aspects are being investigated, and the body of research on language aggression is growing.

The chapter discusses corpus–linguistic challenges and possibilities involved in exploring Hate Speech linked to different constructions in Danish and German. Compiled especially for the XPEROHS–project, grammatically and semantically annotated corpora of Danish and German Twitter and Facebook posts enable qualitative and quantitative exploration of individual word forms or lexemes as well as constructions, understood as conventionalized, non–compositional form-meaning pairings. The chapter illustrates and explains various corpus–linguistic strategies applied to the XPEROHS–corpora and presents their results. Furthermore, we discuss prominent grammatical constructions used to denigrate certain groups like foreigners or Muslims in German and Danish. These include, for example, the I am no racist but… construction, which only superficially signals a balanced standpoint using a highly formulaic introductory phrase. Another construction that works similarly in German and Danish is the alleged (+ ADJ) + NOUN–construction (as in the alleged refugees) in which the adjective supposedly reverses the meaning of the noun. However, though closely related, the two languages do not share all constructions. This is exemplified by the German oh–so + ADJ + NOUN–construction (as in the oh-so-peaceful Muslims), that negates a positive characteristic indicated by the adjective in an ironic way.

The study highlights semantic, syntactic, and functional features of two novel slurs that have recently entered the Russian and Ukrainian languages as a result of the Ukrainian crisis. The words ukrop (dill) and vata (cotton wool) underwent a semantic shift and acquired new negative meanings which can now be used to refer to the opposing groups in hostile communication. The chapter highlights semantic aspects of the words ukrop and vata that make them particularly suitable for use in dehumanizing metaphors, but the main focus of the study is the grammatical changes ukrop and vata underwent as a result of the semantic shift. Used in their traditional senses, both nouns function as uncountable, mass, inanimate nouns. However, novel uses of these words as slurs prompt some unconventional grammatical structures. For example, vata now demonstrates some non-standard subject-verb agreement patterns, and ukrop is sometimes used as a countable noun when it refers to people. Ukrop, used in its new sense, is also moving from the inanimate to the animate noun class. This discussion of the deviations from the grammatical norm expands into a conversation of the connections between the linguistic changes these words are undergoing and extralinguistic context of their use.

Slang is generally considered an unconventional vocabulary characterized by connotations of novelty, informality, and even derogatoriness or offensiveness. As such, it can be used as means of social exclusion and verbal aggression. The derogatory character of slang is particularly evident in its innovatory lexicon, as well as in the metaphorical extensions of its vocabulary. This study adopts a morphopragmatic approach to analyse slang words. In particular, it focuses on the usage of the suffix -o in offensive and aggressive contexts with nefarious intent, as in the words sicko, lesbo, or commo. The study is both dictionary-driven and corpus-based. Data selected from Green’s Dictionary of Slang have been collected in order to investigate how the -o suffix is utilized in hate communication to denigrate, dehumanize, and marginalize groups or individuals. Contextualized examples from COCA are analysed from the quantitative and qualitative viewpoints with the aims to: 1) identify the genres and environments where the -o suffix finds its preferred application, 2) investigate the most common collocational patterns where slang -o words convey a pragmatic meaning [aggressive], and 3) show the specific connotational meanings/pragmatic effects contributed by the -o suffix.

In this morphopragmatic and sociolinguistic contribution, the use of expressive German adjective and noun compounds is investigated in two Austrian corpora, an oral corpus of informal conversations among adults of different sociodemographic backgrounds and a written newspaper corpus. For the qualitative analysis, the study differentiates between direct and indirect aggressive discourse. Although sets of compounds with identical second adjective constituent are denotatively synonymic, the denotative meaning of the second constituent, whereas the first constituent has largely lost its denotative in favour of connotative meaning. Therefore, there is no lexical blocking among the sets of adjectival compounds which have changed into morphopragmatic semiprefixations. Quantitative results show that pejorative expressive compounds are more frequent than meliorative ones. Expressive noun compounds are more frequent in aggressive discourse, although expressive adjective compounds have a higher overall frequency. In informal conversations, direct insults and self-insults are rare, but indirect negative assessments of other persons and complaints about awkward situations prevail. A gender trend indicates that women use slightly fewer negative expressive compounds than men, and an SES effect shows that participants with lower educational levels use fewer positive expressive compounds.

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system. This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities. The use of neuter gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations. In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones appears as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanize women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. The dehumanizing use of neuter gender can further be found in online hate speech directed at trans women and nonbinary individuals. This chapter presents an analysis of the discursive manipulation of grammatical gender as a linguistic tool of dehumanization. It first presents an overview on the distribution of neuter grammatical gender for nouns denoting women within the language system and uses this as a backdrop to analyse occurrences of neuter reference to women and nonbinary people in hateful social media discourse. These findings are explained and theorized from a frame semantic perspective.

The chapter demonstrates the expressive and evaluative potential of grammatical gender and specifically highlights the ways ‘grammatical neutering’ can be used to belittle and other unpopular politicians. The authors develop the idea that in gendered languages intentional deviations from a grammatical norm are pragmatically loaded and express a notable implicit message. They present a number of examples collected from online Ukrainian-language sources where the neuter pronoun vono (it) was used to refer to two presidents: Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, and Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Viewing such examples as cases of grammatical metaphor, the authors show that classifying a referent as ‘other’ may be achieved not only by lexical but also by grammatical means. The application of it and neuter morphology where feminine or masculine is expected while expressing disapproval produces a strong pragmatic effect. The addition of grammatical dehumanization and desexualization to derogatory semantic propositions magnifies the utterances’ negative impact and helps to communicate antipathy and dissociation. The chapter discusses the communicative consequences of grammatical metaphorization of the neuter third person pronoun in Ukrainian political discourse, drawing conclusions about pragmatic effects of grammatical gender alternations.

Access to hate speech has been greatly facilitated by the rise and spread of social media. This chapter examines one clear case of this in the 74–page manifesto entitled, The Great Replacement, posted on Facebook by Brent Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter. This chapter explores how violence-related imperative verbs are used to incite harmful acts against perceived enemies throughout the manifesto. Theoretically, the chapter is grounded in the quantitative cum qualitative tradition of corpus stylistics, whereby lexical frequency patterns are calculated by corpus software and then hand-checked. Methodologically, the study relied on UCREL’s CLAWS7 and WordSmith 6 corpus software to identify and examine violence-related lexis. Three imperative verbs were identified: KILL, DESTROY, and RAGE. Concordances of these verbs were generated and compared to their counterparts in the BNC. The results indicated that, in contrast to the BNC where these verbs were generally used in metaphorical and non-violent ways, the author of the manifesto deployed these verbs in concrete ways in order to incite actual acts of violence against immigrants, economic, and specific political elites. The chapter highlights how these imperatives are used by the author to attempt to position himself as a de facto leader of an envisioned violent, anti-establishment white supremacist movement.

The derogatory meaning of slang words in Modern Greek can be reduced or increased with the use of diminutive or augmentative affixes respectively. The use of evaluative affixes often brings about a change in the grammatical gender of the derived word. A change of gender with or without the use of evaluative suffixes shows, among other things, the speaker’s attitude towards the referent. In general, diminutive words and derived words that keep the gender of the base are used with a less derogatory meaning than the word-base. On the other hand, derivative words that do not maintain the base gender are used with a more insulting/pejorative meaning than the word-base.

The focus of this chapter is the possible dehumanization or infra-humanization of transgender individuals through grammatical means in the Czech language. This language is rich in these features and uses a grammatical gender for persons (not based on the sex of a subject), as opposed to some, more commonly studied, languages (like English) that mark gender exclusively in pronouns. The research questions concern whether there is any misgendering by morphosyntactic means, and if so, how it is constructed, but also how misgendering is constructed, if not by morphosyntactic means. The material consists of four corpora, one in-group, one out-group, one with news texts and one with online posts of different kinds. To detect cases of misgendering in our corpora the authors look at morphosyntactic alignment within the same clauses as well as in a wider context. The result shows that the neuter pronoun ‘it’, or other neuter misgenderings, are rarely used for trans persons in Czech. Misgendering is constructed mainly by subject–predicate disagreement, but also by predicative nouns such as ‘trans men are women’. When looking for insulting expressions in Czech, the search strategy might thus require complementary parameters compared to e.g. English, enhancing the search for specific morphosyntactic features.

In Chapter 6, I argue that the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ have been used interchangeably in the previous literature on the representation of mental illness in the press. Specifically, I argue that using these two terms interchangeably (especially during data collection) may result in incomparable datasets. Through linguistic analysis, I show that the terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ are distinct terms, and that the meaning of the two terms has shifted over the time period covered by the MI 1984–2014 Corpus. I argue that the lexical change I observed is consistent with pragmatic accounts of language change in which the language development is in part a result of euphemism (e.g. Traugott & Dasher, 2002).

Chapter 5 describes the process of constructing the MI 1984–2014 Corpus, from compiling the sampling frame (e.g. search terms, dates covered) to the compilation procedure for the illness and year subcorpora. In particular, a detailed discussion of the interpretative status of search terms is provided. Practical issues related to compiling corpora such as cleaning the data are discussed. Furthermore, the problems that the interdisciplinary nature of corpus construction poses for the researcher are outlined.

This chapter provides a discussion of the reported findings. The research questions are revisited and caveats to the research are discussed. I provide suggestions for how research into the language of mental illness may be developed in future studies. I also discuss the practical implications of the research reported in the book.