Los insultos y palabras tabúes en las interacciones juveniles. Un estudio sociopragmático funcional

According to the Theory of Politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), insults are part of the threatening acts of the interlocutors' face. The objectives of this investigation are: i) to describe the textual and discursive functions of insults in young people's interactions and ii) to describe the type of threat or flattery of insults towards the social image of the participants in the interaction. The corpus consists of six spontaneous conversations among students at university level. We accounted for 511 statements with insults: 379 produced by men (74,17%) and 132 produced by women (25,83). Most of the insults were used with the function of showing closeness among the interlocutors. The most common utterances were exclamative and assertive expressions; and most of the insults were considered not so threatening.