Verbal Abuse in the Documentary Film “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21093/ijeltal.v11i2.2698Keywords:
cyberbullying, impoliteness strategies, psycholinguistics, Verbal abuseAbstract
Digital verbal abuse is increasingly recognized as a serious social and psychological problem, yet studies on its linguistic realization and underlying motivations remain largely separate, and cases occurring within parent–child relationships are rarely examined. This study integrates Culpeper's impoliteness framework with a psycholinguistic perspective to analyze verbal abuse in the Netflix documentary “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish”, which depicts a real case of anonymous cyberbullying perpetrated by a mother against her daughter. Using qualitative content analysis, the study initially employed criterion-based purposive sampling to identify abusive utterances that met the predetermined criteria, and then included all identified utterances through total enumeration. The study analyzed 18 abusive utterances. Findings reveal that positive impoliteness was the dominant strategy (72.22%), followed by negative impoliteness (22.22%) and bald-on-record impoliteness (5.56%), while sarcasm and withholding politeness were absent. Psycholinguistic interpretation indicates that the abuse was motivated not by spontaneous anger alone, but by unresolved childhood trauma and technology-facilitated coercive control aimed at sustaining the victim's emotional dependence. These findings demonstrate the value of integrating pragmatic and psycholinguistic approaches to explain digital verbal abuse within intimate family relations.
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