Swearing in English McEnery, Tony
2006, 20040601, 2005, 2004-05-01, 2004-06-01, Letnik:
1
eBook
Do men use bad language more than women? How do social class and the use of bad language interact? Do young speakers use bad language more frequently than older speakers? Using the spoken section of ...the British National Corpus, Swearing in English explores questions such as these and considers at length the historical origins of modern attitudes to bad language.
Drawing on a variety of methodologies including historical research and corpus linguistics, and a range of data such as corpora, dramatic texts, early modern newsbooks and television, Tony McEnery takes a socio-historical approach to discourses about bad language in English. Arguing that purity of speech and power have come to be connected via a series of moral panics about bad language, the book contends that these moral panics, over time, have generated the differences observable in bad language usage in present day English.
A fascinating, comprehensive insight into an increasingly popular area, this book provides an explanation, and not simply a description, of how modern attitudes to bad language have come about.
List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments 1. Bad Language, Bad Manners Part I: How Brits Swear 2. "So you recorded swearing": Bad Language in Present-day English Part II: Censors, Zealots and Four-letter Assaults on Authority 3. Early Modern Censorship of Bad Language 4. Modern Attitudes to Bad Language Form: The Reformation of Manners 5. Late-twentieth-century Bad Language: The Moral Majority and Four-Letter assaults on Authority Part III: Discourses of Panic 6. Sea Change: The Society for the Reformation of Manners and Moral Panics About Bad Language 7. Mutations: The National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association Moral Panic Postscript Notes Bibliography Index
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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.
