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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 392

Part of Session 102: Swearing and linguistic impoliteness in social interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

Swearing in conversational storytelling

Authors: Norrick, Neal R
Submitted by: Norrick, Neal R (saarland university, Germany)

In my paper, I explore the functions of swearing in conversational storytelling performance by both tellers and listeners, based on narratives in the Santa Barbara Corpus and the Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English. Because swearing expresses emotion in ways not realizable in normal non-taboo language (Jay 2000), swearing by both teller and listener may occur as vigorous evaluation throughout the storytelling performance and at its completion. Labov (1972) makes evaluation a central element of storytelling, calling it the raison d’etre for telling a story at all, and swearing provides a ready means of expressing evaluation forcefully. At the climax of a story, the teller can inject forceful emotion through swearing, just as listeners may react to a story climax in swearing form, both of which occur in the excerpt below.

   Alina:          and he keeps staring at my chest, and it's [like],

   Lenore:       [((laughs))]

   Alina:           y’know, ‘fuck you, asshole,

                        why don't you look at my fa:ce’. 

   Lenore:       ((laughing)) oh shit.

   Alina:          but he didn't believe me I was ma:rried.

This passage also illustrates the tendency I find for swearing on the part of one participant to elicit swearing from the others, resulting in a kind of clustering of offensive language during storytelling performances in conversation. Further, swear words as interjections can serve to redirect topical conversation (Norrick 2009), so participants in conversation naturally have recourse to swearing to justify storytelling and to elicit stories from others. Incipient storytellers deploy interjections as markers of emotional involvement to help justify a narrative as tellable and to obtain the floor, just as participants deploy swear words to elicit stories from others and to set them in motion, thereby becoming listeners. In my data, swearing is particularly frequent in constructed dialogue, providing a resource for both primary storytellers and listeners to construct and accentuate dialogue in the storytelling performance (see McEnery 2006). Moreover, swearing tends to accompany transgressive stories, tales that encroach upon the upper bounding or ‘dark side’ of tellability in the sense of Norrick (2005). Coates (2003) explicitly notes the occurrence of swearing in men’s stories about transgressive behavior. Apparently in certain groups (Coates would say especially among men), telling humorous stories calls for swearing. Swearing also occurs when listeners comment negatively on the telling performance itself, and when they express disagreement with something the teller says. Swearing is a fundamental form of talk, serving emotional needs we cannot otherwise fulfill; it recurs at specific junctures in conversational storytelling with functions which deserve further attention.

References

Coates, Jennifer. 2003. Men talk. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why we curse. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania  Press.

McEnery, Tony. 2006. Swearing in English. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Norrick, Neal R. 2005. The dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry, 15, 323-343.

Norrick, Neal R. 2009. Interjections as pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics,41, 866-891.