This monograph investigates verbal aggression in contemporary Polish from a usage-based and perception-oriented perspective. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines survey data on speakers’ evaluations of aggressive expressions with a corpus-based analysis of their occurrence in authentic discourse. The findings demonstrate that verbal aggression is not an inherent property of lexical items, but rather an emergent, context-dependent phenomenon shaped by interpretation, communicative setting, and social variables. By integrating linguistic, pragmatic, and computational approaches, the book challenges traditional views that treat aggressive language as a fixed category and instead proposes a gradient, non-prototypical model of verbal aggression. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between perception and actual language use, as well as to the limitations of automated hate speech detection systems. The study contributes to research in linguistics, discourse analysis, and media studies, offering new insights into the dynamics of evaluative language in contemporary communication.
