Chapter 4
The Devil is in the schema
A constructional perspective on Swedish taboo-avoiding
strategies
Swedish swearwords are predominantly religious in origin (e.g.
fan ‘the Devil’, helvete ‘hell’, and
jävlar ‘devils, demons’). The former taboo status of
swearing is still reflected in the existence and productive use of
taboo-avoiding strategies, most notably phonological modification (e.g.
fasen < fan ‘the Devil’,
helsicke < helvete ‘hell’). This
paper discusses such taboo-avoiding strategies from the perspective of
usage-based Construction Grammar. It argues that taboo-avoiding relies on
schematic swearing constructions in combination with radical coercion in
general and on submorphemic coercion in particular: The meaning of a
taboo-avoiding expression is entirely constructional, and the lexical
semantics of the slot-filling items is irrelevant. Evidence for the
cognitive reality of phonologically schematic swearing constructions is
found in a corpus-based analysis of selected taboo-avoiding patterns, which
shows that swearing constructions are not only instantiated by lexicalized
variants, but also used productively, as illustrated by infrequent
types.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Swearing in Swedish: Cultural history, forms, and functions
- 3.A constructional approach to hell: The devil is in the schema
- 3.1Swearwords and swearing constructions
- 3.2Taboo-avoiding strategies, radical coercion, and extravagance
- 3.3Phonological schemas and submorphemic coercion
- 4.Corpus evidence for productive phonological schemas
- 4.1Preliminary considerations
- 4.2Schema I: [hel-x]
- 4.3Schema II: [jä-x-a(r)]
- 4.4Schema III: [fa-x]
- 4.5Differences in productivity
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
Acknowledgement
-
References