For the purpose of ensuring terminological consistency, the word przemoc (violence) should be reserved in the ethics of the word for such an unethical communication behaviour as (by an analogy to the phenomenon of violence described in social sciences) is a forcible destructive act (it weakens the position of the attacked person, brings losses to them or injures them, thus violating their dignity or sovereignty and depriving them of their self-esteem), and the attacked person cannot effectively defend themselves against such an act. An unethical act of communication may be aimed at one addressee but it always harms the audience by changing the moral standards of communication. Communication violence might be ideological (symbolic or ritual) or spontaneous.
The subject matter of this paper is media coverage concerning violence, which come from newspapers and web portals, selected by themes. The aim is to reconstruct the image of violence presented in the media, both as regards the lexical layer and narration structures. The author focuses on “private” violence, i.e. one done to ordinary people by others, outside the context of wars, ideologies, races, collective identities, or the criminal world.
In the lexical layer, the linguistic image of violence is formed by emotionally marked vocabulary, which shows, by contrast, victims and perpetrators together with their acts, as well as police and legal vocabulary, which serve the purpose of making the account reliable. Narration regarding violence includes repeatable patterns, which show the process resulting in acts of violence and ending with the perpetrators being punished.
The contents concerning violence, including drastic details, are exposed in titles, thus advertising texts and presenting such contents to readers as particularly important and interesting.
This paper is an attempt to review the meaning of the category of stylizacja (stylisation), which has been established in the research tradition of linguistics and literary studies, and propose the term słowo gwarowe (a dialect word) instead. According to the author, the term stylizacja gwarowa (dialect stylisation) (dialektyzacja (dialectisation)) is inadequate for many contemporary literary pieces the nature of which is afictional and heterotrophic, and requires a new theoretical approach.
The author defines słowo gwarowe as a type of an “interjected” voice of another person (often with anachronous folk roots), which is close to the word Innego/obcego (the other / strange). Based on the material of a few literary works (Sońka by I. Karpowicza, Gnój (Piece of Shit) by W. Kuczok, Pióropusz (War Bonnet) by M. Pilot), she shows that słowo gwarowe is a voice of someone worse, often potentially excluded, who is or should be outside the space belonging to the Self. Dialect is not treated here as a variant of general language, yet is preserves the value of archaism, strangeness and anachronism of thinking, which leads to notions such as marginalisation and exclusion.
