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• Insults, medical terminology and metaphorization in a corpus of Facebook comments: an investigation of some ableist slurs

  14-33

  Elena Pepponi

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  The aim of this article is to analyse a corpus of Facebook comments extracted by the public pages of Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Renzi and Matteo Salvini concerning the year 2018 (Orrù 2020). The analysis aims to focus on three Italian ableist slurs about cognitive impairment (cerebroleso, handicappato and ritardato) used as metaphors in online speech acts. Comments will be analysed with a multifaceted approach. The theoretical point of view will involve studies about insults as linguistic and pragmatic acts (Brown & Levinson 1987; Culpeper 1996; Alfonzetti 2017), slurs and hate speech (Bianchi 2021; Cepollaro 2020), ableism built by medical terminology (Gualdo & Telve 2011), and finally metaphor (Mortara Garavelli 1988). With these theoretical bases, inquiries will be conducted with a corpus-based methodology, focusing on metaphors and cluster, syntax, and pragmatics of the linguistic acts involving target words.