Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 521

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

Swearing as an alignment technique

Authors: Bernardi, Verena
Submitted by: Bernardi, Verena (Saarland University, Germany)

Swearing is an integral part of daily life for many people. The phenomenon of swearing has been a subject in various research areas and recent investigations have often focused on the psychological aspects (e.g. Jay and Janschewitz 2008), offensiveness and frequency ratings (e.g. Beers-Fägersten 2007; Rassin and Muris 2004), and the history of swearing (e.g. Ljung 2011). The following study will analyze how swear words can serve interpersonal functions and contribute to highlighting conversational alignment (Bubel 2006) between friends, more specifically, how swearing helps interlocutors display involvement and friendship in conversations, e.g. in the extract below, where one man completes an utterance in progress for another to express his support by using a swear word:

352 Max               but then they ended up selling it,
353                     for exactly what we offered them. (2.0)
354                       like-
355 Douglas        [like dicks].
356 Max             [like almost] a year later, (1.5)

This passage illustrates how swear words can serve to align oneself with an interlocutor. As jointly producing a turn in itself is already a sign of interpersonal alignment, its accomplishment by means of a swear word strengthens the perception of the speaker’s “friend status” and encourages him in his abilities to interpret, understand and agree with his friend’s emotional state.

This study will attempt to categorize three highly context- and interlocutor-dependent functions (affirmative swearing, reinforcing swearing, affectionate swearing) of swear words with different forms of realization (expletive interjections, emphasizers, joint production of turns, formulaic expressions, etc.). Each category will provide evidence opposed to the popular beliefs that swearing primarily expresses the speaker’s emotional state and that “swearing […] functions differently […] for male and female users” (Stapleton 2010: 293). My conversational data demonstrates that, although the display of emotional involvement cannot and should not be denied, the primary functions of swear words can be employed by men and women to an equal extent in order to structurally and/or emotionally align oneself with one’s interlocutor(s). Hence, swear words are one way for speakers to verbally express their affection or to display their affiliation with a person or a group, their agreement with a statement, their support of an evaluation. Here, as in all cases, interpretation depends on factors such as context, speaker/listener relationship, intonation, etc., and my analysis is based on conversations among friends, which by itself affects the interpretation of the speaker/listener relationship toward one of mutual affection.

References:

Beers-Fägersten, Kristy. 2007. Swear word and offensiveness. Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics (SWPL) 1. 14-37.

Bubel, Claudia. 2006. The linguistic construction of character relations in TV drama: Doing friendship in Sex and the City. PhD dissertation. Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes.

Jay, Timothy; and Kristin Janschewitz. 2008. The pragmatics of swearing. Journal of Politeness Research 4. 267-288.

Rassin, Eric; and Peter Muris. 2004. Why do women swear? An exploration of reasons for and perceived efficacy of swearing in Dutch female students. Personality and Individual Differences 38. 1669-1674.

Stapleton, Karyn. Swearing. 2010. Handbook of Pragmatics 6: Interpersonal Pragmatics. Mouton de Gruyter. 289-306.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Swearing as an alignment technique