Violencia lingüística en las redes sociales

Taking into account that, currently, violence is a very frequent phenomenon, this article analyzes a specific type of violence, namely linguistic violence. Specifically, out analysis deals with two topics: the different degrees of violence in speech acts and the resources and techniques that are used to produce violent utterances. By considering politeness studies focused on impoliteness, the work proposes a categorization of violent speech acts that reflects different levels of violence, understanding, therefore, violence as a gradual and noncategorical concept. In the study, a corpus of interactions extracted from Twitter and Facebook is analyzed. The rise of social networks, their ease of use and their features make of these platforms an excellent database for this type of analysis. The results show a significant presence of high levels of linguistic violence in social networks, being the implicitness a feature that in most cases characterizes these utterances. Those results led to reconsider the common idea that defends that explicitness is necessary in order to label an action as violent, and the outstanding presence of high violence categories. It would be necessary to pay more attention to the violent implicit content of utterances which, as shown by the analysis, is not less violent than the explicit one.