McEnery, A. M. and Xiao, Z. (2003) Fuck revisited. In: Proceedings of the corpus linguistics 2003 conference :. Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language Technical Papers, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, pp. 504-512.
Abstract
This paper is a follow up to the investigation of McEnery, Baker and Hardie (2000) into the use of the word fuck in spoken British English. Both that paper and this are based on the British National Corpus. However, at the time of writing in 2000, the analysis of fuck in the written BNC had not been completed, hence the 2000 paper focussed on spoken English alone. In doing so, it explored the way fuck varied with respect to a range of meta-data encoded in the spoken BNC, principally age, sex and social class. We have now explored the written section of the BNC, and have explored the distribution of fuck with respect to a subset of the metadata encoded in the written BNC, namely domain, author gender, author age, audience gender, audience age, audience level, reception status, medium of text and date of creation. As some of these features have clear analogues in the spoken BNC (most clearly age and sex) comparisons between the work presented here and the earlier work on spoken English will be presented wherever possible. Throughout, unless otherwise stated, references to the frequency of usage of features in spoken language are taken from McEnery, Baker and Hardie (ibid).