35.3224, Calls: What the fuck!? The f-word across linguistics, translation and the arts

Fri Nov 15 02:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3224. Fri Nov 15 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3224, Calls: What the fuck!? The f-word across linguistics, translation and the arts

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Date: 15-Nov-2024
From: Florent Moncomble [florent.moncomble at univ-artois.fr]
Subject: What the fuck!? The f-word across linguistics, translation and the arts

Full Title: What the fuck!? The f-word across linguistics, translation
and the arts
Short Title: WTF

Date: 24-Sep-2025 - 26-Sep-2025
Location: Arras, France
Contact Person: Florent Moncomble
Meeting Email: wtf at sciencesconf.org
Web Site: https://wtf.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 05-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:

This conference, which will take place at the Université d’Artois in
Arras, France on 24-26 September 2025, aims at exploring the manifold
nature and uses of ‘fuck’—‘the most important and powerful word in the
English language’ (Sheidlower 2009)—from the viewpoints of
linguistics, translation studies and culture.

Call for Papers:

(The following is an extract from the call for papers. The full
version, with modalities for submission, can be found on the
conference website https://wtf.sciencesconf.org/)

As an object of formal linguistics, ‘fuck’ is itself polymorphous:
while as an autonomous lexeme it may be a noun, a verb or an
interjection (Oxford English Dictionary 2024; Green’s Dictionary of
Slang), it also shares morphological, syntactic and phonological
traits with a variety of other linguistic objects (such as affixes or
clitics) used in constructions equally challenging for analytical
frameworks, where the freedom imparted by expressivity (in the sense
developed by Guillaume 1991) takes over conventional morphosyntax.

This slipperiness lends the ‘f-word’ a plasticity which in turn
invites reflection along sociolinguistic and pragmatic lines: as a
salient contributor to the triad of taboo topics (religion, excretion
and sex), ‘fuck’ bears the status of a totemic item whose symbolism
simultaneously borrows from and extends beyond its literal meaning,
turning its use, but also its avoidance, into flexible instruments of
identification, belonging and social positioning. Beyond its
transgressive role in social interactions, ‘fuck’ may then aptly serve
as a pragmatic lens exposing how relational work is structured along
the lines of various power dynamics: the committee encourages
proposals exploring how these questions may indeed prolong or depart
from the classical perspective of ‘facework’ (Goffman 1955) and
politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) in general.

The conference will also welcome studies of the concrete translation
challenges that the f-word poses in relation to other languages: its
nimbleness and close relationship with orality indeed often lead to
compensation, or even to partial or non-translations in localization.
Such choices when translating profanity combine or collide with many
others which affect characterization and tone in the context of
fiction for example, and which need to be examined. This also serves
as a reminder that translation practices remain medium-dependent, as
in the way the written form of subtitles trigger different reactions
to on-screen profanity compared with dubbing for example (Rollo 2017).
>From the more global perspective of cultural transfer, taboos and ‘bad
language’ also testify to the socially and politically charged process
that translation is, prompting reflection on matters of positionality,
reception and censorship, and which translation often crystallizes.

All those points of interest coalesce in the intense emotional and
transgressive, sometimes playful dimension that ‘fuck’ retains in
artistic and cultural expression in the Anglosphere. With its
inescapable political content, notably as part of a form of
‘them-and-us’ polarising rhetoric, it is a weapon of choice for
anti-establishment aesthetic practices—a ‘four-letter assault on
authority’ (McEnery 2004), whether in music (punk in particular),
cinema, or literature, but also on social media where it naturally
flourishes (Morris 2022). As a metonymy of obscenity and
transgression, the f-word could be seen as a barometer of how cultural
scenarios of marginality, revolt and censorship reformulate themselves
throughout the ages and the arts, and on which we invite discussion –
whether it directs our attention to certain processes of
self-marginalisation within reclaim practices for example, or to a
society’s own relation to a puritanism which may obscure certain
social realities in return.

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