The pragmatics of swearing
-
Timothy Jay
Abstract
The main purpose of swearing is to express emotions, especially anger and frustration. Swear words are well suited to express emotion as their primary meanings are connotative. The emotional impact of swearing depends on one's experience with a culture and its language conventions. A cognitive psychological framework is used to account for swearing in a variety of contexts and provide a link to impoliteness research. In support of this framework, native and non-native English-speaking college students rated the offensiveness and likelihood of hypothetical scenarios involving taboo words. The ratings demonstrated that appropriateness of swearing is highly contextually variable, dependent on speaker-listener relationship, social-physical context, and particular word used. Additionally, offensiveness ratings were shown to depend on gender (for native speakers) and English experience (for non-native speakers). Collectively these data support the idea that it takes time for speakers to learn where, when, and with whom swearing is appropriate.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora An introduction to the special edition
- “Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
- Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
- Participants' orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction
- Impoliteness and emotional arguments
- The pragmatics of swearing
- Rudeness, conceptual blending theory and relational work
- Sociopragmática y Retórica Interpersonal: La Cortesía en Inglés y Castellano. [Interpersonal Sociopragmatics and Rhetoric: Politeness in British English and Spanish], by John A. G. Ardila
- Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French, by Kate Beeching
- Terms of (Im) Politeness: A Study of the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese (Im) Polite Terms of Address, by Dániel Z. Kádár
- Sarcasm and Other Mixed Messages: The Ambiguous Way People Use Language, by Patricia Ann Rockwell
- Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora An introduction to the special edition
- “Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
- Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
- Participants' orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction
- Impoliteness and emotional arguments
- The pragmatics of swearing
- Rudeness, conceptual blending theory and relational work
- Sociopragmática y Retórica Interpersonal: La Cortesía en Inglés y Castellano. [Interpersonal Sociopragmatics and Rhetoric: Politeness in British English and Spanish], by John A. G. Ardila
- Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French, by Kate Beeching
- Terms of (Im) Politeness: A Study of the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese (Im) Polite Terms of Address, by Dániel Z. Kádár
- Sarcasm and Other Mixed Messages: The Ambiguous Way People Use Language, by Patricia Ann Rockwell
- Contributors
