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Part of
Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages
Edited by Evie Coussé, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt and Julia Prentice
[Constructional Approaches to Language 37] 2023
► pp. 81–113

Chapter 4
The Devil is in the schema

A constructional perspective on Swedish taboo-avoiding strategies

| Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

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.

Keywords: swearing, linguistic taboo, Swedish, Construction Grammar, phonological schematicity
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
Published online: 7 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.37.04hod
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