Violence and Impoliteness Speech in Social Networks

This article analyzes a selection of comments published in two Costa Rican media on the social network Facebook. The main objective is to understand how discursive violence and linguistic prejudice is manifested in this particular type of interactions. The analysis is based on theory of impoliteness strategies of Kaul de Marlangeon and Culpeper and considers the contributions of Bourdieu's symbolic violence. Methodologically, the guidelines of discursive pragmatics were followed for the textual analysis. The principles of corpus linguistics were used for working with data extracted from digital media. One of the main findings corresponds to the censorship suffered, on social networks, by people who do not dominants the norm of the written language, particularly spelling. With regard to impoliteness language, it is concluded that the most frequent are those that use insult and sarcasm to damage the social image of the interlocutor.