[Lingtyp] Swearwords as a negator and/or minimizer: a cross-linguistic perspective

Sun Jun 18 13:54:59 UTC 2023

Dear all,

what a topic, indeed. Continuing Matti's comment (quoted below):

The Finnish "aggressive mood" (the term was coined by Jaakko Häkkinen, then student of Finno-Ugric studies, inspired by the random fact that the Permic languages [Komi and Udmurt] have a case called "egressive") also allows zero in the place of the swearword: to modify Matti's example below, "mä suihku-s laula!" I shower-INE sing.CNG ‘I don’t sing in the shower!’. (These zero constructions have been investigated by Lari Kotilainen in much detail, and Matti has written more about this in his 2010 paper: https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/matmies/publications/miestamo-negwithoutneg-web.pdf .) This is possible because of the asymmetric character of the negation in Finnic (as in most of Uralic): the negative auxiliary carries the person marking, while the lexical verb is in a specific connegative form – which, then, can be interpreted as the carrier of negativity either alone or "strengthened" with a swear word and/or a NPI ("Vittu sä mitään suihkus laula!" SW you anything(NPI).PART shower.INE sing.CNG).

The Finnish zero-negator/"aggressive" system, thus, is different from the type in which the swearword behaves like a syntactic object ("I know/see/have SW", "SW I know/see/have" for ‘I don’t know/see/have anything’), for instance, carrying accusative marking, even with intransitive verbs. In Finnic, clausal negation normally requires the object in the partitive case, but partitive SWs in the "aggressive" construction are completely impossible according to my native-speaker intuition.

(Partitive SWs do occur as objects in squatitive constructions, but only together with explicit negation: sä e-t tiedä paska-a-kaan [you NEG-2SG know.CNG shit-PART-POL.PTCL] ‘you don't know anything at all’. Also, object-like partitive SWs can very well be used in (rhetorical) questions: vittu-a-ks sä suihku-s laula-t? SW-PART-Q you shower-INE sing-2SG ‘why/what the *** do you sing in the shower?’, ‘why the *** should you sing in the shower? [implied meaning: you shouldn’t]’.)

The sentences which are constructed like normal affirmative ones, only with an object-like (?) but clause-initial negator SW, as in Matti's example "Vitut mä suihkus laulan" below, are interesting. According to my intuition, the nominative plural is possible – also the case of the plural "total object", also known as "nominative accusative" in traditional grammars – but not the genitive singular, that is, the "genitive-accusative" or the case of the singular total object. To me, "vitun [SW-GEN] mä suihkus laulan" can only be interpreted (with considerable effort) as an affirmative clause with SW as the object of ‘singing’, while "vitun mä suihkus laula [sing-CNG]" is simply impossible.

Long story short: Finnish doesn't like encoding negator SWs like unequivocal direct objects. Also, they do not behave like real negators.

However, singular object-like negator SWs seem to be possible in languages more deeply affected by Russian. In his reminiscences of fieldwork among the Veps at the turbulent times of 1917-18, Lauri Kettunen quoted a local man's comment to news about the revolution: "ńuńan buntuibad" [dick-GEN revolt-PRS.3PL] ‘the SW will they revolt’. This looks like a direct adaptation of the Russian construction.

From this point of view, it's interesting to compare Finnish with colloquial Estonian, where – as Denys Teptiuk pointed out – the transparently Russian borrowing "hui" is used as a "symmetric" negator in a completely un-Finnic way ("hui mäleta-n" [SW remember-1SG] ‘I don’t remember’, cf. the normal negative construction "(ma) ei mäleta" ‘I NEG remember.CNG’). I wouldn't say that Estonian syntax is otherwise strongly influenced by Russian (the way the Finnic languages of Russia, such as Veps, are). Estonian, however, differs from Finnish in two respects: the negative auxiliary has lost its inflection, and instead of Finnish NPIs, there are neutral indefinite pronouns or polar particles (ta teab midagi ‘s/he knows something’ – ta ei tea midagi ‘s/he doesn’t know anything’; cf. Finnish hän tietää jota(k)in [Indef.] – hän ei tiedä mitään [NPI]). Also, Estonian, AFAIK, has no zero-negator "aggressive" constructions of the Finnish type. Would this mean that Estonian negation is moving towards a more "symmetric" (SAE-like) type?

Summing up: SW negation in connection with Uralic asymmetric negation types and the presence or absence of NPIs is very complicated. And in this e-mail, I have probably used the Finnish V word more times than in my entire life (for a female person of my generation and my old-fashioned upbringing, it's still a very strong one, although I do swear a lot using the more traditional demons-and-excrements vocabulary).

Best
Johanna
--
Univ.Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL)
Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Campus AAKH Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7
A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at • http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
Project ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/ 

>>> 
>>> 
>>> Il giorno mar 13 giu 2023 alle ore 22:50 Miestamo, Matti M P <matti.miestamo at helsinki.fi <mailto:matti.miestamo at helsinki.fi>> ha scritto:
>>>> Hi, All,
>>>> 
>>>> Finnish is quite interesting in this regard. Swearwords (e.g. paskat ’shit’, vittu ’female genitals (vulgar)') can be used as negators clause initially. The standard negation construction in Finnish has a negative auxiliary inflected for person and number, and then the lexical verb appears in a non-finite connegative form. Interestingly, with these swearwords used as negators, the lexical verb can also appear in the connegative form, so the swearword takes the place of the negative auxiliary in the construction. There is some variation, though, and sometimes the lexical verb occurs with finite inflecttions. Here are some (colloquial Southern FInnish) examples:
>>>> 
>>>> Mä laulan suihkus ’I sing in the shower'
>>>> 1SG sing.1SG shower.INE
>>>> 
>>>> Mä en laula suihkus ’I don’t sing in the shower'
>>>> 1SG NEG.1SG sing.CNG shower.INE
>>>> 
>>>> En mä suihkus laula  ’I don’t sing in the *shower*’ (more contrastive with the negator appearing initially)
>>>> NEG.1SG 1SG shower.INE sing.CNG 
>>>> 
>>>> Vittu mä suihkus laula ’I *don’t* sing in the shower’, ’The hell I sing in the shower’
>>>> SW 1SG shower.INE sing.CNG
>>>> 
>>>> Vitut mä suihkus laulan ’I *don’t* sing in the shower’, ’The hell I sing in the shower’
>>>> SW.PL <http://sw.pl/> 1SG shower.INE sing.1SG
>>>> 
>>>> (It has even been suggested that the personal pronoun is cliticized to the swearword and then it could be seen as a paradigm — vittu-mä, vittu-sä, etc. that has been half-humorously called the aggressive mood...)
>>>> 
>>>> The system is more complicated than can be shown here, but I hope this gives an idea of how it basically works. Unfortunately there isn’t much written on it in English. (Note also that it is in many ways related to an emphatic negative construction where negation is expressed without overt negators; there is a short account of this in my paper "Negatives without negators” in the 2010 Rara Rarissima volume.)
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Matti
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Matti Miestamo
>>>> https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/matmies/
>>>> 
>>>> 

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