Verbal Crime: The Problem of Insult in the Media Text

Abstract

The article is devoted to verbal crimes, the qualification of which requires the cooperation of lawyers and linguists. Linguists are directly involved into qualification of verbal crimes such as conspiracy, incitement, threat, insult, etc. The use of language always contains the potential of "natural insult", a violation of conventional rules. This violation effects not the same perlocutionary result. The legal definition of insult is essentially an appeal to linguistic flair. Insult is mostly associated with the use of a particular obscene (invective) lexicon. Any media text that contains allegations about people or institutions can be challenged in court, that is, it can be considered as an insult. Therefore, any media text that is not initially intended as a conflict can cause a conflict. This is supported by the language itself. The specificity of the studied problem area led to the hermeneutic approach, focused on interpretation and explanation; the method of linguistic deduction and induction. Interpretative approach, based on the assumption that the values do not exist in isolation, are not contained in words and sentences, not extracted from them, but understood by the recipient on the basis of the speech features and context, was extremely relevant.