Impolite suffixoids in English slang

This study conducts a corpus-assisted analysis to investigate the role of some slang morphological means in contexts of impoliteness and offensiveness. In particular, the study adopts a morphopragmatic approach to explore the pragmatic functions/effects associated with the slang suffixoids -ass (e.g. fat ass), -brain (e.g. birdbrain), -face (e.g. shitface), and -head (e.g. airhead) used in verbal aggression. The productivity of -head and similar elements positions them on the borderline between compounding and derivation, as part of transitional morphology, i.e. transitional between sub-components of word-formation. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of data drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, Davies 2008) demonstrates the frequency of the morphological processes, their privileged co-texts, and their effects in context. The contrastive English-Italian analysis using Open Parallel Corpus – English (OPUS2) illustrates how the two languages express impoliteness and offensiveness through different morphological and syntactic means.