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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 660

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

To challenge or not to challenge? An analysis of dirty words in Greek teenage storytelling.

Authors: Karachaliou, Rania; Archakis, Argiris
Submitted by: Karachaliou, Rania (University of Patras, Greece)

The aim of this paper is to account for the use of dirty words in Greek teenage storytelling. Our research is based on the analysis of 134 narratives that naturally occurred in two conversations between male adolescents. The informants of the first conversation are members of a close-knit group, bad students and “troublemakers”, while the youngsters in the second conversation are good students and not close friends. We are particularly interested in the combinations of dirty words with the Greek marker re, which, when used in narrative interaction, is considered as an interjection signaling a presumably unexpected piece of information (Karachaliou & Archakis, 2012 forthcoming). We argue that swearing along with re contributes to the construction of identity and/or the organization of the narrative.

Following Stenstrom et al. (2002), we consider dirty words those taboo words which are perceived as offensive by society at large. Such words can be multifunctional. We specifically focus our interest on the use of dirty words in narrative performances, which are regarded as a particularly suitable locus for identity construction (De Fina 2003).

In the first conversation, the majority of dirty words combined with re are used as abusives (Stenstrom et al. 2002: 64), i.e. aggressive swearing directed towards a specific recipient, which occurs in direct speech and accompanies conflict talk between story characters. Through this practice, narrators in narrative climaxes seem to delegitimize certain groups of people such as policemen etc. by constructing for themselves the identity of the powerful individuals who challenge the authorities. Therefore, swearing enables them to make the distinction between “us” and “them” manifest.

In the second conversation, narrators use bad language less frequently. The majority of dirty words combined with re are used as expletives (Stenstrom et al. 2002: 64), i.e. expressions of strong feelings (e.g. frustration) either justifying tellability or evaluating the narrative point (Norrick 2008). The narrators use bad language less, thus presenting themselves as teenagers who speak in an ‘appropriate’ manner and respect mainstream values.

Consequently, we would like to suggest that dirty words combined with re contribute to the structure of the narrative performance and to the negotiation of youth identities.

References:

De Fina, A. 2003. Identity in narrative: A study of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Karachaliou, R. & Archakis, A. 2012 (forthcoming). The Greek particle ρε as a marker of unexpectedness: Evidence from the analysis of conversational narratives. In Studies in Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the 32^ndAnnual Meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki: Institute for Modern Greek Studies. [in Greek]

Norrick, N. 2008. Using large corpora of conversation to investigate narrative: The case of interjections in conversational storytelling performance. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13. 438-464.

Stenstrom, A., Andersen, G. & Hasund, I. K. 2002. Trends in Teenage Talk. Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.