Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in the BNC.

McEnery, A. M. and Xiao, R. Z. (2004) Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in the BNC. Language and Literature, 13 (3). pp. 235-268. ISSN 0963-9470

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Abstract

Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently studied, though some recent work on swearing in American English, Australian English and British English has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic account of swear-words in English. In terms of approaches, swearing has been approached from the points of view of history, lexicography, psycholinguistics and semantics. There have been few studies of swearing based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and social class. Such a study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the production of the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus of modern British English, such a study became possible. In addition to parts of speech, the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic features such as age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register, publication medium and domain. While bad language may be related to religion (e.g. Jesus, heaven, hell and damn), sex (e.g. fuck), racism (e.g. nigger), defecation (e.g. shit), homophobia (e.g. queer) and other matters, we will, in this article, examine only the pattern of uses of fuck and its morphological variants, because this is a typical swear-word that occurs frequently in the BNC. This article will build and expand upon the examination of fuck by McEnery et al. (2000) by examining the distribution pattern of fuck within and across spoken and written registers.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Language and Literature
Additional Information:
The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Language and Literature, 13 (3), 2004, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2004 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Feminist Theory page: http://lal.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/libraryofcongress/p1
Subjects:
?? BNCCORPUSFUCKSOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLESWEARLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGELANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICSLITERATURE AND LITERARY THEORYP PHILOLOGY. LINGUISTICS ??
ID Code:
52
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
17 Jun 2005
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
22 Sep 2023 00:09