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I pragmatically and morally analyze three categories of ubiquitous speech: gendered naming, love avowals, and insults. In Chapter 1, I argue that our naming practices are out of step with widely held social values about gender equality. I identify what I call the BioSex Logic of Naming, according to which strong social norms prescribe that first names track presumed biological sex. I argue gender-specific names and gender-specific pronouns are natural bedfellows, both of which play a crucial, companionate role in reinforcing gender essentialism and maintaining gender hierarchy. I conclude that we have strong pro tanto reasons to jettison both gender-specific pronouns and gender-specific names while also protecting binary trans* people who are at beholden to the current system for gendered uptake. In Chapter 2, I argue love avowals have a morally dark side. At their best, love avowals, such as, “I love you” are welcome expressions of affection and devotion. Love’s positive public image makes love avowals an appealing tool of manipulation. But, like the Trojan Horse, its surface appearance conceals ugly realities. This simplistic veneer diverts our attention away from the normative profundity of love avowals, which often function pragmatically as solicitations, illegitimate demands, excuses, exonerations, and the like. Love avowals conceal tacit bids for commitments that one may not entertain if they were communicated explicitly. I illuminate the pragmatic function of love avowals and argue we ought to be more critical of them, as they play a key role in consequential social scripts, some of which facilitate abuse. In Chapter 3, I argue, contrary to dominant thought, insults are not inherently morally wrong. Insults can have a unique organizing role in social justice movements and reimagining social hierarchies of race and gender. Extant theories generalize the nature of insults from a narrow subset of insults and conceive of them as invariably problematic. This theoretical commitment to the immorality of insults precludes the possibility of developing an ethics of insults. I develop a morally neutral theory of insults that identifies an overlooked variety, third-personal insults, and allows a distinction between permissible and impermissible insults.

The study explores the practice, meaning and significance of invective and insults in political discourse among Ghanaians. It examines the use of such language forms against people of higher social status in online discourse in Ghana, a country where it is traditionally unacceptable to openly criticize the elderly and authority figures, let alone insult them. Data was sourced from GhanaWeb [www.ghanaweb.com], the most patronized online news website in Ghana that ensures anonymous citizen participation in issues of national interest. The data involved invective and insult-filled online reader comments on news reports about the presidential candidates and the electoral commissioner involved in the 2016 general election in Ghana. Metapragmatic comments (reader reactions) which portray Ghanaian sociocultural perspectives on the use of abusive language against these individuals were also gathered. These two sets of comments were used to build the Corpus of GhanaWeb Comments on Ghana’s 2016 Election (CGCGE16). In addition to CGCGE16, the data for the study included comments from social media platforms, native speakers’ intuitions and the views of Ghanaian anthropological linguists and cultural specialists obtained from interviews, and evidence from scholarly works. The qualitative meaning analysis method is used along with the quantitative discourse analysis method. The study adopts an ethnopragmatic approach, combining corpus-based searches with semantic explications and cultural scripts, following the principles of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach (Wierzbicka, 1992, 1996; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014). The findings indicate that most of the comments in CGCGE16 are personal attacks that violate the Ghanaian communicative norms towards the elderly and people in authority and, furthermore, do not conform to the expected displays of verbal respect. Instead of expressing their views on on-going socio-political issues, the commenters often draw on past socio-political occurrences, their public and sociocultural knowledge to engage in negative emotional characterizations and evaluations of the presidential candidates and the electoral commissioner, thereby, showing disapproval of them. By means of name-calling expressions, derogatory adjectives, and derogatory interjections, these commenters attack the intellectual abilities, moral behaviour, social competence, and physical characteristics of their targets. This negative communicative behaviour is attributed to the fact that on GhanaWeb, like on many online communities, interactants are not obliged to uphold communicative norms. The anonymity of GhanaWeb shields commenters from the repercussions such speech behaviours would otherwise necessitate. It is also attributed to the right to freedom of speech, the repeal of the criminal libel law, and the fact that traditionally, there are some specific settings that allow the use of insults against authority. The study demonstrates that although the practice of using insults against political leaders in online commentary appears to be “normal” in the online context, it is a transgression when one considers the Ghanaian sociocultural norms of communication. Consistent with this, although the interaction on GhanaWeb is asynchronous, some commenters play the role of regulatory figures and traditional gatekeepers of appropriate communicative behaviour by posting disapproving metapragmatic comments. The study identifies many ways in which interactions on GhanaWeb are culturally shaped. These include first, commenters do not only rely on English slang terms and swearwords, they also employ some local language insulting expressions (e.g. kwasea ‘fool’, yaka gbɔmɔ ‘worthless person’) due to the ‘weight’ such expressions carry for Ghanaians. Secondly, the metapragmatic comments do not employ certain key terms such as “offensiveness” that can be found in the literature on online studies related to the speakers of Inner Circle Englishes. Instead, they highlight the clear position of the Ghanaian culture on respect for elders and people in authority. These metapragmatic comments also stress the fact that the exchange of invective and insults in politics can result in violence which may have adverse effects on the development of the nation. Overall, the study is inclined towards the view that instead of generalizing the results of studies on abusive language use in online interactions, there is a need to draw out what distinguishes Ghanaian online interactants from, let’s say, Western countries, Asian countries, African countries, or from interactants elsewhere. The key claim is that understanding the sociocultural backdrop for the speech practices of online interactants is crucial to understanding their language use, as interactants draw on existing communicative repertoires which influence their language choices. Also, the study draws attention to news websites in Ghana as a platform where the use of unmitigated invective and insults against people of higher social status is increasingly becoming the norm, despite the fact it violates Ghanaian communicative values. Thus, this study serves as a springboard for future research into abusive language use in online interactions among Ghanaians.

Using the social networking site Facebook as a corpus, I collected 1,500 random samples of interactions between friends. I tracked the use of jokes and disparaging humor between same- and opposite-gender pairs to discover that there is a strong correlation between the style of joke-making evoked by the speaker and the gender of both the speaker and the hearer. The men in the study were about eight times more likely to make insulting or degrading jokes with other men than the women were with each other. Following the study is a discussion where I address methods of politeness across genders, approaches to humor, and how sex, culture, and gender expectations influence our communicative choices. Though the discussion is based in our linguistic choices, the results of the study reflect trends that are present in countless aspects of society, and the issues that are raised go far beyond the spoken word.

Using the social networking site Facebook as a corpus, I collected 1,500 random samples of interactions between friends. I tracked the use of jokes and disparaging humor between same- and opposite-gender pairs to discover that there is a strong correlation between the style of joke-making evoked by the speaker and the gender of both the speaker and the hearer. The men in the study were about eight times more likely to make insulting or degrading jokes with other men than the women were with each other. Following the study is a discussion where I address methods of politeness across genders, approaches to humor, and how sex, culture, and gender expectations influence our communicative choices. Though the discussion is based in our linguistic choices, the results of the study reflect trends that are present in countless aspects of society, and the issues that are raised go far beyond the spoken word.

The purpose of this study was: to determine what insults college students know and use; to develop a model of insult use in general, and of sexual orientation-related insult (SOI) use in particular; and, to understand the impact of SOI use on students of different sexual orientations. Data were collected from interview participants, field observations on and around a university campus, top-rated movies and TV shows, and two focus groups with lesbian/gay/bisexual (LGB) students. Overall, the interview participants generated 1,453 insults, a mean of 20 insults. Men listed significantly more SOI's than women. The insult categories rated as "worst" by participants were race-related, SOI's, and insults for women. Field data yielded 317 insults. The three most frequent categories of field insults were for women, personality-related insults, and SOI's (accounting for 14.5% of field insults). Fag was one of the five most frequently overheard insults, and was used significantly more frequently by men than women. None of the recorded SOI uses appeared to be directed to an LGB target. The media data yielded 655 insults, with comedies including significantly more insults than dramas. SOI's accounted for 1.8% of media insults. Decisions regarding both serious and good-natured insult use involved four major components: insulter characteristics, social cues to be read, social cues to be conveyed, and the response of the insult target (and sometimes of an audience). The majority of heterosexual participants identified SOI's as inappropriate to direct towards LGB people, though LGB participants described numerous examples of being maliciously targeted with SOI's. Heterosexual participants who were supportive of LGB people were significantly less likely to use SOI's than participants who were ambivalent or disapproving. Heterosexual men used SOI's with greater frequency than heterosexual women. These men used SOI's primarily as tools of peer pressure and regulating gender role expression in other men. SOI's were a safe way for men with traditional conceptions of masculinity to express affection for each other while asserting heterosexuality; less traditional men were less likely to use SOI's.

This project examines political and cultural constructions of speech and conversation in early modern Venice. While many writers from Cicero to Aquinas had considered the importance of spoken language, early modern Italy witnessed an explosion of interest in this topic as a result of the combined cultural and social changes of the Renaissance and Reformations. As the sixteenth-century center of the printing industry, a vibrant commercial port, and a pilgrimage city, Venice offers a unique arena in which to explore the notion of public speech since the social control of laborers, immigrants, and foreigners demanded verbal discipline. This thesis uses a variety of sources---books of comportment, legal compendia, proverbs, civic statutes, chronicles, anatomy texts, legislation, and most importantly court cases---to demonstrate that both the Venetian State and its citizens were profoundly concerned about regulating verbal exchange. Considering the roots and effects of these anxieties in Venice roughly between 1525 and 1600, the study makes three principal arguments. First, the Venetian state gave new attention to public language in the sixteenth century, punishing unmannered language such as blasphemy, foul language and insults more frequently and severely than ever before. This increased focus on disciplining the tongue arose from a variety of economic, political, and cultural factors, including new levels of immigration and declining commercial fortunes. Second, conceptions of class hierarchy in Venice were both reflected in and constructed by language as public speech adhered to newly articulated aristocratic models of containment and control. Third, through its investigation of gossip, the dissertation addresses issues of speech and gender. While gossip was coded by male writers as feminine, destructive speech, in practice the gender component of gossip remained inherently unstable as both men and women gossiped as a means of conflict resolution in the neighborhood, workplace, and government itself. The Republic's formal use of structured rhetoric and oratory was only part of the way that Venetian politics worked, as the more fluid speech of gossip also fueled political life. In short, this is a study of the expectations and anxieties surrounding public, verbal exchange among sixteenth-century Venetians.