Expressing Insult in English Authoritarian Discourse of Children (Gender Perspective)

Abstract

The article focuses on verbal and nonverbal features of expressing insult in authoritarian discourse of children with account for the interlocutors’ gender and their fixed placement in each other’s zones of discursive surroundings. Insulting the addressee involves applying verbal and non-verbal cues to humiliate them and hurt their feelings, and is based on the aims of the child-addresser. To provide further validity of the results obtained, the author has selected communicative situations of implementing insult in dyads of children wherein both interlocutors find themselves in the horizontal dimension of interaction and try to construct the power hierarchy. Furthermore, the speakers’ gender has been taken into consideration; therefore, situations of same-sex and opposite-sex sibling and non-sibling communication are investigated. Dyads of sisters insult each other calling for the other’s withdrawal from the shared discursive space through the use of movement predicates and discourse markers of decreasing the importance of the addressee; the mixed groups tend to mirror the verbal and non-verbal repertoire of the authoritarian addresser; brothers implement insult via low register vocabulary to express scorn for cowardice via sarcasm and invective vocabulary. The non-sibling cluster of girls expresses insult to jeopardize the relationship with the addressee by means of pretend condemnation of violating etiquette norms and a careless attitude towards their appearance through the use of various complex argumented syntactic constructions and does not resort to lowering the register; the mixed dyadic pairs typically refer to the addressee’s intellectual skills or age in an offensive manner via pejorative vocatives of olfactory nature and zoonyms; the subgroups of boys implement insult via introducing invective means on the verbal and non-verbal levels.