Invading the hearer’s auditory space. A prosodic analysis of Italian insults

Impoliteness is a broad field of research that also encompasses insults, which are forms of verbal attack that involve a degree of injury and social censure. From a linguistic standpoint, insults are characterised by distinctive verbal and non-verbal cues, including specific phonetic and prosodic alterations. The aim of this research was to analyse, for the first time, the prosody of Italian insults using a spectro-acoustic approach. The study utilised data from 15 oral role plays performed by six professional theatre actors. The objective of the study was to investigate the extent to which duration, intensity, and pitch range are employed to convey the specific meaning of an invasion of the listener’s auditory space. The analysis demonstrated that insults exhibited longer nuclear vowels and higher intensity values than the control speech sample. Conversely, the pitch range of the target utterances was narrowed, with the majority of f0 values situated within the high-frequency range.