A PRAGMATIC FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING CYBER AGGRESSION AND ABUSE BEYOND TOXIC LEXICONS IN ONLINE COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Cyber Aggression and Abuse (CAA) is a highly structured form of digital 
hostility that requires a more sophisticated linguistic analysis than is provided by 
established psychological paradigms. The present study examines the pragmatic and 
linguistic factors at play in cyberbullying through the use of Speech Act Theory and 
Jonathan Culpeper’s Impoliteness framework. This paper employs a qualitative 
descriptive design and corpus-based linguistic analysis to investigate the language of 
offenders in their commission of purposeful face-attacks and symbolic violence 
through commands, expressives, and commissives. The results reveal that digital 
impoliteness is not monolithic but strongly constrained by platform-specific 
affordances. High-velocity platforms produce naked on-record impoliteness, threaded 
groups produce theatrical irony. Moreover, multimodal features allow for extreme 
negative impoliteness such as cyberflashing. In the end, understanding CAA as a set 
of performative language interventions provides valuable insights into how to 
construct more rigorous, context-aware Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems 
for automatic content moderation.