Insult and the construction of the other's identity

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to present and analyse insults in Portuguese political discourse. In the first part of our paper we present the current political context in Portugal and a recent term which describes the Portuguese political arena, "crispação" [friction]. Then we offer a detailed state of the art on the linguistic research on verbal aggressiveness and the act of insulting and propose a definition for the insult. The analysis of the examples selected from the electoral and the parliamentary corpus is the most consistent part of our work, showing how insults are proffered in these contexts. Regardless of the hypothesis that the political discourse has a functional aggressive feature, due to its confrontational nature (between the representatives of the opposition and of the government who fight for power), our analysis proves that insults are offensive and contribute to the general degradation of the current political discourse in Portugal.