HUMILIATION AND INSULT IN DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article discusses the difference between the legal and common linguistic understanding of the categories “humiliation” and “insult”. Special attention is paid to the problem of usage of these semantic categories in discourse, i.e. to their correlation with the notions “speech strategy” and “speech act”. The material under study includes the definitions from the Criminal and Administrative Code of the Russian Federation, about a thousand contexts ranging from one sentence to a short text fragment taken from the Russian National Corpus, Internet library “Google.books.ru”, Runet communications published in blogs, forums and on social networking sites and from online news sites. Apart from text fragments, the material under analysis includes multimedia objects - scenes from movies depicting situations of humiliation or insult. In general, insult is a separate speech act, whereas humiliation is a speech strategy which can be realized both in a single and in a complex speech (and not only speech) act. By using various insults, the subject (or a group of subjects) can realize not the strategy of insult but the strategy of humiliation. It means that it is still humiliation that is the final result of a series of planned insults. In order to avoid conflicts in expert and forensic practices in cases of humiliation and insult, it is necessary that both these notions (and not only insult) be defined in the law. And it is also imperative that these definitions should not come into significant conflict with the use of the corresponding notions in the communicative practice of the Russian language speakers.