Advances in Swearing Research

Any behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

Timothy B. Jay, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, January 2018:
The outstanding asset of this collection is its focus on how taboo words are used – that is, their functions – rather than how taboo words are grammatically structured. The attention to new approaches and contexts is another major advantage here. The editors’ well-written introduction outlines the content of the book and sets the research in historical context. The well-summarised and light-hearted epilogue by Jean-Marc Dewaele concludes the work. Reading these opening and closing essays will persuade most scholars to turn to what lies between them.