Slang is generally considered an unconventional vocabulary characterized by connotations of novelty, informality, and even derogatoriness or offensiveness. As such, it can be used as means of social exclusion and verbal aggression. The derogatory character of slang is particularly evident in its innovatory lexicon, as well as in the metaphorical extensions of its vocabulary. This study adopts a morphopragmatic approach to analyse slang words. In particular, it focuses on the usage of the suffix -o in offensive and aggressive contexts with nefarious intent, as in the words sicko, lesbo, or commo. The study is both dictionary-driven and corpus-based. Data selected from Green’s Dictionary of Slang have been collected in order to investigate how the -o suffix is utilized in hate communication to denigrate, dehumanize, and marginalize groups or individuals. Contextualized examples from COCA are analysed from the quantitative and qualitative viewpoints with the aims to: 1) identify the genres and environments where the -o suffix finds its preferred application, 2) investigate the most common collocational patterns where slang -o words convey a pragmatic meaning [aggressive], and 3) show the specific connotational meanings/pragmatic effects contributed by the -o suffix.

In this morphopragmatic and sociolinguistic contribution, the use of expressive German adjective and noun compounds is investigated in two Austrian corpora, an oral corpus of informal conversations among adults of different sociodemographic backgrounds and a written newspaper corpus. For the qualitative analysis, the study differentiates between direct and indirect aggressive discourse. Although sets of compounds with identical second adjective constituent are denotatively synonymic, the denotative meaning of the second constituent, whereas the first constituent has largely lost its denotative in favour of connotative meaning. Therefore, there is no lexical blocking among the sets of adjectival compounds which have changed into morphopragmatic semiprefixations. Quantitative results show that pejorative expressive compounds are more frequent than meliorative ones. Expressive noun compounds are more frequent in aggressive discourse, although expressive adjective compounds have a higher overall frequency. In informal conversations, direct insults and self-insults are rare, but indirect negative assessments of other persons and complaints about awkward situations prevail. A gender trend indicates that women use slightly fewer negative expressive compounds than men, and an SES effect shows that participants with lower educational levels use fewer positive expressive compounds.