The Language of Harassment - by Victoria Guillén-Nieto (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book addresses the lack of research on harassment by offering a thorough linguistic analysis of this social phenomenon. By applying interactional pragmatics, the author sheds light on the key elements of harassment, which includes hostile and unethical communication, power imbalances, and harm caused to the victim.

Book Synopsis

This book addresses harassment head-on by conducting a thorough linguistic analysis of this pervasive social phenomenon and investigates the strategic language used by harassers to convey their ill intentions and inflict harm upon their victims. The linguistic analysis focuses on how harassment is conducted through verbal and physical interactions between the perpetrator or group of perpetrators and the victim at a discourse level. The author revisits several court cases held in the United States and Europe to show the phenomenal difficulties victims face to support their claims with evidence. The Language of Harassment applies pragmatic linguistic theories to shed light on the defining elements of harassment, which include repetitive acts of hostile and unethical communication, ill intentions, power imbalances, and harm inflicted upon the victim. In addition, the author illustrates the linguistic analysis through real-life cases of workplace mobbing, school bullying, sexual and psychological harassment, stalking, and sexting.

Review Quotes

""This volume is a welcome contribution to harassment studies. As stated from the very beginning, the scope of the term is slippery, overlapping with other terms such as mobbing, abuse or aggression, which adds to the need for a book that pins down all the issues that, one way or another, pertain to the delimitation and linguistic analysis of harassment. The complexity of the object of study (highly necessary given its pervasiveness in today's world) inevitably demands complex theoretical underpinnings, which in this book are mainly interactional pragmatics but also related frameworks such as speech act theory and relevance theory, among others. The book's chapters also signal the necessity of a publication on this topic and how slippery it is. Still, the author convincingly lays out all the issues and provides a detailed account of definitions, types and elements of harassment, and most importantly, an innovative proposal of how pragmatics can be applied to this controversial issue. A necessary and welcome book."" --Francisco Yus, University of Alicante

"A most valuable and necessary contribution to the discussion of interactional pragmatics and its role within Forensic Linguistics. The author provides a comprehensive study on harassment in an insightful, extremely readable and well-argued book because it combines legal studies and pragmatics. It keeps a high standard of precision since it is based on real examples of harassment in different environments that range from school to workplace through group harassment or sexting. This is a must-read for linguists, lawyers, criminologists, and psychologists, among others." --Carmen Aguilera Carnerero, University Campus of Cartuja

"Victoria Guillén-Nieto's book on harassment comprehensively analyses a complex and multifaceted topic. This study focuses mainly on linguistic aspects but encompasses a thorough discussion of juridical aspects of the question in different legislative frameworks. This book also addresses one of the main problems in dealing with harassment, i.e. the fact that the very definition of this notion is rather problematic and not uncontroversial. This book tackles the question through the lens of Genre theory and finally provides an accurate definition of the notion on which future studies can rely. The linguistic analysis is carried out from a pragmatic perspective, within an integrated framework based on different approaches. The discussion of several case studies shows how these different perspectives interact in the analysis of real cases of harassment. In the end, this book is destined to be a reference on harassment and a methodological model in Forensic Linguistics." --Paolo Greco, University of Naples Federico II

"In this book, prof. Guillén-Nieto tackles a highly topical issue - harassment via language. Adopting a pragma-linguistic perspective, this book offers a convincing definition of this form of verbal abuse grounded in speech act theory and the complex relationship between speaker intent and the harmful effect on the recipient. As an experienced forensic linguist, the author combines up-to-date linguistic analysis with a wealth of examples from the legal point of view, including many legal cases and court judgments, giving valuable insights into verbal harassment in both in-person interactions and virtual communication. Thanks to the lucid and highly readable style, this book will be of interest not only to linguists and lawyers but also to many other professionals, including psychologists, sociologists, HR department employees and school guidance counsellors, as well as members of the general public." --Barbora Chovancová, Masaryk University

About the Author

Victoria Guillén-Nieto is associate professor of applied linguistics at the University of Alicante.