30.337, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Fägersten, Stapleton (2017)

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Subject: 30.337, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics: Fägersten, Stapleton (2017)

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Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2019 15:19:43
From: Gordana Lalic-Krstin [glalic1 at yahoo.com]
Subject: Advances in Swearing Research

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-4567.html

EDITOR: Kristy  Beers Fägersten
EDITOR: Karyn  Stapleton
TITLE: Advances in Swearing Research
SUBTITLE: New languages and new contexts
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 282
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Gordana Lalic-Krstin, University of Novi Sad

SUMMARY

“Advances in Swearing Research”, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten and Karyn
Stapleton, is an eleven-chapter volume focusing on the topic of swearing and
the use of swearwords in, as the subtitle says, new languages and new
contexts. Although this taboo linguistic practice is traditionally associated
with aggressive behaviour and negative attitudes, research shows that it
frequently performs many other, non-abusive functions, ranging from
constructing and maintaining identity, establishing rapport, signalling group
membership, and providing authenticity, to expressing humour. The aim of this
book is to expand the scope of swearing research to under-studied languages
and contexts, thus paving the way for future research.

The Introduction, written by the editors, positions the present volume in a
wider setting of swearing research and gives an overview of the most common
issues in the linguistic study of swearwords. Two main themes in swearing
research are those of frequency and the degree of offensiveness, i.e. how
often people swear and how offensive their swearing is, which leads us to the
“swearing paradox”, as defined by Beers Fägersten (2007), the phenomenon that
the most frequently used swearwords tend to be those judged to be the most
offensive. Both frequency and offensiveness studies are complicated by two
problems: the degree of inclusiveness of the definition of a swearword and the
subjectivity of judgement in assessing offensiveness. There is no clear
consensus among language users (or linguists, for that matter) on what should
count as a swearword, as this is directly linked to the word’s perceived
offensiveness, which again is highly subjective and context-dependent. Yet, as
the editors point out, it is exactly this inter-personal and intra-personal
variation in the usage of swearwords, triggered by contextual features and
sociolinguistic variables, that makes swearing a meaningful activity (p. 5).
The Introduction also touches upon some other relevant topics, such as the
functions of swearing (psychological, social and interpersonal), gender
expectations as regards swearing, folk-linguistic beliefs that swearing is
typical of lower socioeconomic groups, and swearing as means of constructing
and maintaining identities. Finally, it gives a general overview of the
present volume and summarizes each of the following chapters.

Chapter 1, written by Marianne Rathje, explores swearing in three Danish
children’s television series by combining quantitative and qualitative
analyses. The author’s decision to choose dialogues from two contemporary
series and contrast them with one broadcast in the 1980’s enables her to draw
conclusions as to whether there are significant changes in the frequency of
swearword usage or in the type of swearwords used in these programmes. The
results show that there have indeed been changes in both: the rate of swearing
has almost doubled and there is an observable shift from mainly religious
swearwords to those related to sex and lower bodily functions. The data also
reveals that whereas in the 1980’s children rarely swore in the presence of
adults and when they did, they were reprimanded, in the more recent series
children tend to swear more and are not corrected. Two further aspects are
dealt with: gender of the swearer and swearing as means of constructing
identity, where it turns out that in the scripted dialogues of these series
boys swear more than girls and so do villains as opposed to heroes. Rathje
distinguishes between swearwords in the narrow sense and other types of
aggressive language, also shown to be on the increase, and stresses that these
also need to be studied in greater detail.

Chapter 2, co-authored by Bernie Chun Nam Mak and Erika Darics, investigates
the functions of swearing in instant messaging in a Hong Kong workplace
context and how computer-mediated communication technologies can frame and
reframe swearing. Their corpus consists of 78,000-word instant messages
exchanged by bilingual Chinese-English colleagues in three Hong Kong
companies. They demonstrate how swearing is used for humorous and playful
purposes, frequently featuring codeswitching between English and Chinese along
with a creative use of keyboard symbols, emoticons and affordances of the
instant messenger. Although there are cases of swearing used to express
negative feelings and devaluation, the data indicates that swearing is
frequently used for other purposes, such as to highlight in-group and
out-group identity, contextualize social talk in advance, serve as a reply to
humour, and show solidarity. Computer-mediated communication, together with
the use of multimodal means, seems to render swearing more acceptable at the
workplace, where the use of taboo language is traditionally discouraged.

Chapter 3, written by Kristy Beers Fägersten, focuses on the use of the
English word ‘fuck’ in Swedish print media. English swearwords are being used
in many other languages and this paper shows that in Swedish ‘fuck’ has been
fully appropriated. This is exemplified by its use in media such as
newspapers, film and book titles, and comic strips. but also by its being
fully integrated into the morphological system of Swedish. The important
sociolinguistic topic of the relationship between media and standard language
is dealt with in one of the sections, with special emphasis on whether the
media adopt or establish the standard variety, the reasons why the media use
standard language, the use of non-standard language in media and in
particular, the use of swearwords, usually associated with non-standard
varieties. The author concludes that examples of ‘fuck’ in Swedish are not a
case of “top-down imposition of linguistic practices onto the media consumer,
but rather the effects of a trickle-up process in which linguistic practices
‘from below’ are rendered mainstream” (p. 81). This in turn helps standardize
English swearword usage in Swedish.

Chapter 4, written by Alexandra Jaffe, also examines the use of the English
swearword ‘fuck’ but in several French expressions as they are used in France
and Quebec. The data come from online francophone texts in the two varieties.
It complements Beers Fägersten’s chapter in that it explores non-native use of
English ‘fuck’ and its functions in another language. By looking at the two
varieties of French, the author is able to determine that ‘fuck alors’, ‘fuck’
and ‘WTF’ (“what the fuck”) are used in France as stance markers, as opposed
to the use of ‘fucker le chien’ in Canadian French, where this expression is a
nativized idiom, undoubtedly under the influence of a different status of
English in the Canadian bilingual context. As it is pointed out, the
“other-languageness” of ‘fuck’ may not be the same for all speakers, which
opens up possibilities for creating dynamic new meanings.

Chapter 5, by Eline Zenner, Tom Ruette and Emma Devriendt, looks into the
borrowability of English swearwords into Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch. It
ties in closely with the two previous chapters both by investigating
non-native use of English swearwords and by comparing and contrasting two
varieties of the same language. They study the use of 882 English swearwords
and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses using a corpus of over six
million dated and geo-located tweets in the two varieties of Dutch. As the
authors say, social networks can provide new insights into swearing practices
because they combine characteristics of written and spoken discourse and they
feature public discussion of private matters (p. 111). Firstly, they aim to
determine the overlap of borrowability patterns of English swearwords for
Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch and find no notable variation. Secondly,
in establishing what parameters affect variation in borrowability, they
discover that “swearwords are less likely to be borrowed if they belong to the
sexuality and physiology category, of if they are deemed to be very offensive
in the receptor language” (p. 131). Thirdly, qualitative analysis of the
corpus enables them to uncover different levels of linguistic creativity of
Dutch speakers using English swearwords.

Chapter 6, written by Michael Gauthier and Adrien Guille, presents results
obtained from a corpus study of gender and age differences in swearing on
Twitter. Swearing is traditionally associated with men while women are
believed to swear less and to use less intensive swearwords, a belief that can
then lead to different gender expectations and stigmatization. Previous
research indicates that social media may in future provide a context in which
the use of swearwords by women, especially younger women, could increase. The
authors use innovative methodology to test whether this is happening by
researching a corpus of over one million tweets issued by nearly 16,000
UK-based users of known age and gender. What they find is that although
differences between men’s and women’s swearing practices on Twitter do differ
in some respects, especially in the use of specific strong swearwords and the
range of contexts in which they are used, the hypothesis that young women
swear more frequently and more intensively is not confirmed by their data. 

Chapter 7, by Anna-Brita Stenström, explores swearing among English and
Spanish teenagers, the age group which is generally believed to use a lot of
swearwords. The author sets out to answer several research questions: is the
use of religious swearwords decreasing, as is often claimed; do teenagers
today swear more than twenty years ago; how did their inventory of swearwords
change if at all; how do genders compare as regards frequency and
offensiveness of swearing; and are teenagers, who are generally regarded as
linguistic innovators, affecting the overall vocabulary of swearing. The main
research material comes from online corpora of teenage language (English and
Spanish) and is supplemented by general reference corpora of adult language.
Somewhat surprisingly, the author finds that religious swearwords are not used
less than before although they are more common among adults; that teenagers do
not swear more than they used to; the inventory of the top swearwords remains
the same as twenty years ago, with ‘cunt’ the only word more common than
before; boys do swear more than girls and they do so using stronger
swearwords; and finally, teenagers may be influencing the general swearing
vocabulary. Stenström also finds that teenagers use swearing primarily as a
social device, to provide phatic interaction and strengthen interpersonal and
intra-group connections.
 
Chapter 8, co-authored by Matteo Di Cristofaro and Tony McEnery, presents
results of a corpus research into the use of euphemisms and dysphemisms in the
noun position of the Italian multi-word expression ‘rompere i coglioni’
(‘break the balls/testicles’). They hypothesize that a construction can have a
conventionalized taboo status, and that this status is linked to the
occurrence of dysphemisms in that construction (p. 195). By using corpus tools
and the Construction Grammar theoretical framework, they are able to confirm
that ‘rompere’ has a strong relation with taboo language, as it frequently
collocates with several dysphemisms and euphemisms. A word’s euphemistic
status, they argue, is linked to the taboo status of the construction in which
it is used. After a detailed analysis of each of the collocating nouns, the
authors turn their attention to compound nouns derived from the multi-word
expression under scrutiny. The results show that there is a high degree of
conventionalization in the use of the verb ‘rompere’ in swearing formulae but
also that the taboo status of the construction is linked to the occurrence of
dysphemisms, which then facilitates the taboo use of other words, which
function as euphemisms.

Chapter 9, by Tomoko Shimoyama, Fereidoon Shadpayam and Mary Parhizgari, is
devoted to an exploration of the nature of swearing by God in Persian.
Swearing in this view deviates from traditional Western conceptions of
swearing. The authors argue that swearing can only be studied by taking into
account a wider socio-cultural context. Contrary to the offensiveness and
taboo associated with swearing by God in Western languages, Persian swearing
by God has retained its original meaning as taking an oath, and as such is
able to perform a diverse range of (non-offensive) communicative functions.
(p. 216). However, it is subject to similar social sanctions as conventional
swearing. Working within the analytical framework of speech act theory, they
analyze spontaneous speech utterances, field-recorded by the authors in Tehran
and its suburbs, which contain instances of swearing by God by Persian
speakers of different genders, ages, social status, religious, political and
education backgrounds. The recordings were supplemented with interviews,
allowing authors to access native speaker intuition and metalinguistic
comments. After a historical overview of the development of the two types of
swearing in the Persian and wider Indo-European context, swearing by and
swearing at, the authors investigate three speech acts: swearing by God,
praying and declaring.

Chapter 10, written by Minna Hjort, presents results of a recent survey of
Finnish folk definitions and perceptions of swearing. The author’s goal is to
explore what Finnish language users think is covered by the semantic fields of
‘swearword’ and ‘swearing’ and to arrive at typical folk definitions. Some of
the tested aspects are: self-assessed frequency of swearing, attitudes to
swearing (degree of acceptance), perceived changes in swearing frequency over
time and perceived age/gender/education differences in swearing frequency. In
the next part of the survey, the respondents were presented with a number of
situations and asked to say whether they might swear in them. The responses
show a correlation with factors such as formality, familiarity and quality and
cause of affect, with the most likely type being pain-induced
non-propositional swearing with a low likelihood of audience. The survey also
tests the respondents’ attitudes to particular swearwords and swearing
expressions and contains a listing/ordering task in which the respondents are
asked to list swearwords in the order of strength. In short, there is a
general tendency for respondents to see themselves as active swearers but
support restrictions in swearword usage, as well as for the confirmation of
the most common stereotypes: that teenagers swear more than adults, that
swearing is negatively correlated with education, that men swear more than
women, etc.

Chapter 11, by Jean-Marc Dewaele, the final section of this volume, is
entitled “Epilogue”. It is not research-based but instead serves as a summary
of some of the most interesting research topics and results presented in the
book. Dewaele, a swearing researcher himself, gives the reader his view of the
volume but also recounts some recent media-reported events of swearing in
public.

EVALUATION

Although swearing is generally no longer considered to be a subject unworthy
of serious linguistic research, many authors still complain about the paucity
of swearing research, especially for languages other than English. This book
aims at alleviating this problem as its focus is on other, frequently
under-researched languages. The benefit of such an approach is twofold: it
facilitates linguistic comparison of swearing practices in different languages
and cultures but also serves as a valuable source of bibliographic information
for other languages. Interesting in this respect are also those chapters that
look at the use of English swearwords in other languages as well as those that
investigate two different varieties of pluricentric languages (European and
Quebecois French, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch).

Another common thread, as the title of the book explicitly states, is the
emphasis on new contexts. Swearing is a predominantly oral phenomenon, not
usually associated with written discourse. However, as many of the chapters in
this volume show, it is seeping into written media and the new contexts in
which swearing is increasingly being used can provide a fruitful area of
research. Many of the papers investigate contexts that are new by either being
relatively recent (e.g. Twitter or instant messaging) or by being relatively
new to swearing (e.g. children’s television series or public media). These new
media present opportunities for a creative linguistic use of their
affordances, amply illustrated in many of the chapters: from
code-switching/code-mixing to the exploitation of multimodal means.

The volume is comprised of chapters that are written from a variety of
theoretical standpoints and that apply different analytical frameworks. Yet,
this does not distract but rather demonstrates the complexity of swearing as a
linguistic, social and psychological phenomenon and will help open up new
possibilities in subsequent studies. Promising methodological innovations are
presented in several chapters, which will surely advance future research,
especially in the field of social media.

Overall, the volume raises intriguing questions and offers substantiated
answers based on empirical evidence, while at the same time covering a wide
variety of aspects of this sociolinguistic phenomenon. It shows that a
linguistic practice which is, as the editors say, bound to arouse controversy,
disagreement, disdain, shock and indignation but can also imbue passion,
sincerity, intimacy, solidarity and jocularity should be an obvious target of
in-depth scholarship (p. 1). What most of the authors seem to point out is the
shortcomings of existing definitions of swearwords and the necessity to study
more languages, so perhaps a more comprehensive volume dedicated to swearing
is in order.

REFERENCES

Beers Fägersten, Kristy. 2007. A sociolinguistic analysis of swear word
offensiveness. Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics 1. 14-37.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Gordana Lalić-Krstin is an assistant professor at the Department of English
Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Her primary
research interests include lexical semantics and pragmatics, lexicography and
sociolinguistics. She has been studying lexical blending in English and
Serbian and is an avid collector of blends.





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