The multifunctionality of swear/taboo words in television series
Monika Bednarek |
The University of Sydney (Australia)
|
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (Germany)
This chapter focuses on swear/taboo words, which can be used for the expression of emotion. It combines a theoretical with an applied lens, in first discussing their place in Systemic Functional Linguistics, before examining their use in contemporary US television series. To do so, the chapter makes use of a new corpus of dialogue transcribed from 66 contemporary TV series: the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV). SydTV is a small, specialized corpus which has been designed to be representative of the language variety of fictional US American TV dialogue. The analysis of SydTV focuses on the frequency, distribution and functions of swear/taboo words, showing that they are a prime example of the multifunctionality of much television dialogue. As I will illustrate with examples, they can be used for characterization, for humor, as a plot device, as a catch-phrase, to create realism, or to control viewer evaluation/emotion.
2006Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allan, Keith & Kate Burridge
2009 “Swearing.” In Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English, ed. by Pam Peters, Peter Collins & Adam Smith, 361‒386. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Alonso, Belmonte Isabel
This volume. “Victims, Heroes and Villains in Newsbites: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spanish Eviction Crisis in El País.”
Al-Surmi, Mansoor
2012 “Authenticity and TV Shows: A Multidimensional Analysis Perspective.” TESOL Quarterly 46 (4): 671‒694. .
Anderson, Luvell & Ernie Lepore
2013 “Slurring Words.” Noûs 47 (1): 25‒48.
Andersson, Lars-Gunnar & Peter Trudgill
1990Bad Language. London: Penguin.
Azzaro, Gabriele
2005Four-Letter Films: Taboo Language in Movies. Rome: Aracne.
Bednarek, Monika
2006Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London: Continuum.
Bednarek, Monika
2008Emotion Talk across Corpora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2015a “Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Television and Film Narratives.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies, ed. by Paul Baker & Tony McEnery, 63–87. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bednarek, Monika
2015b “ ‘Wicked’ Women in Contemporary Pop Culture: ‘Bad’ Language and Gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie and Saving Grace.” Text & Talk 35 (4): 431‒451. .
Bednarek, Monika
2017 “The Role of Dialogue in Fiction.” In Pragmatics of Fiction, ed. by Miriam Locher & Andreas H. Jucker, 129‒158. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Bednarek, Monika
2018Language and Television Series. A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bednarek, Monika
Under review. “‘Don’t Say Crap. Don’t Use Swear Words.’ – Negotiating the Use of Swear/Taboo Words in the Narrative Mass Media.”
Beers Fägersten, Kristy
2012Who’s Swearing Now? The Social Aspects of Conversational Swearing. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Benítez-Castro, Miguel Ángel & Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio
This volume. “Rethinking Martin & White’s affect Taxonomy: A Psychologically-Inspired Approach to the Linguistic Expression of Emotion.”
Bennett, Tara
2014Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show. London: Titan Books. Kindle Edition.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan
1999Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Blakemore, Diane
2015 “Slurs and Expletives: A Case against a General Account of Expressive Meaning.” Language Sciences 52: 22–35. .
Bleichenbacher, Lukas
2008Multilingualism in the Movies. Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices. Tübingen: Francke.
2001Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2004 “The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25 (2–3): 204‒222. .
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2015 “British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: Do Native British English Speakers Swear More ‒ or Differently ‒ Compared to American English Speakers?” Applied Linguistic Review 6 (3): 309–339. .
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2016 “Thirty Shades of Offensiveness: L1 and LX English Users’ Understanding, Perception and Self-Reported Use of Negative Emotion-Laden Words.” Journal of Pragmatics 94: 112‒127. .
2015 “ ‘Swear Words’ and ‘Curse Words’ in Australian (and American) English: At the Crossroads of Pragmatics, Semantics and Sociolinguistics.” Intercultural Pragmatics 12 (2): 189‒218. .
Halliday, M. A. K. & Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen
2004An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. London: Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen
2014Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. 4th ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hoeksema, Jack & Donna Jo Napoli
2008 “Just for the Hell of It: A Comparison of Two Taboo-Term Constructions.” Journal of Linguistics 44 (2): 347–378. .
Hood, Susan & James R. Martin
2007 “Invoking Attitude: The Play of Graduation in Appraising Discourse.” In Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, ed. by Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen & Jonathan Webster, 739‒764. London: Equinox.
Jay, Timothy
2000Why We Curse: A Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jay, Timothy & Kristen Janschewitz
2008 “The Pragmatics of Swearing.” Journal of Politeness Research 4 (2): 267‒288. .
Jay, Kristen & Timothy Jay
2013 “A Child’s Garden of Curses: A Gender, Historical, and Age-Related Evaluation of the Taboo Lexicon.” The American Journal of Psychology 126 (4): 459‒475. .
Kozloff, Sarah
2000Overhearing Film Dialogue. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press.
Lawson, Mark
2007 “Mark Lawson Talks to David Chase.” In Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. by Janet McCabe & Kim Akass, 185–221. London: I.B. Tauris.
This volume. “The Syntax of an Emotional Expletive in English.”
Mandala, Susan
2010The Question of Style: Language in Science Fiction and Fantasy. London: Continuum.
Martin, James R.
2000 “Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English.” In Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, ed. by Susan Hunston & Geoff Thompson, 142‒175. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, James R.
2010 “Semantic Variation ‒ Modelling Realization, Instantiation and Individuation in Social Semiosis.” In New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation, ed. by Monika Bednarek & James R. Martin, 1‒34. London: Continuum.
Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White
2005The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCabe, Janet & Kim Akass
(eds.)2007Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris.
McEnery, Anthony
2006Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. Abingdon: Routledge.
McEnery, Anthony, John Paul Baker & Andrew Hardie
2000 “Assessing Claims about Language Use with Corpus Data – Swearing and Abuse.” In Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English, ed. by John M. Kirk, 44‒55. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.
McMillan, James B.
1980 “Infixing and Interposing in English.” American Speech 55 (3): 163‒183. .
Mittmann, Brigitta
2006 “With a Little Help from Friends (and Others): Lexico-Pragmatic Characteristics of Original and Dubbed Film Dialogue.” In: Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg – Proceedings, ed. by Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe & Anja Müller, 573–585. Trier: WVT.
Oatley, Keith
2002 “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction.” In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. by Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange & Timothy C. Brook, 39‒69. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ofcom (Office of Communications)
2005 “Language and Sexual Imagery in Broadcasting: A Contextual Investigation.” Research study by the Fuse Group for Ofcom. Accessed August 29th, 2017. [URL]
Ofcom (Office of Communications)
2010 “Audience Attitudes towards Offensive Language on Television and Radio.” Research study by Synovate UK for Ofcom. Accessed August 29th, 2017. [URL]
Perek, Florent
2016 “Using Distributional Semantics to Study Syntactic Productivity in Diachrony: A Case Study.” Linguistics 54 (1): 149–188. .
Potts, Christopher
2007 “The Expressive Dimension.” Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2): 165‒198. .
Price, Jack
2015 ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ The Use of Bad Language in Contemporary American Television Series. Honours thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney.
Priggé, Steven
2005Created by … Inside the Minds of TV’s Top Show Creators. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.
2003 “Gender and Swearing: A Community Practice.” Women and Language 26 (2): 22‒33.
Stapleton, Karyn
2010 “Swearing.” In Interpersonal Pragmatics, ed. by Miriam A. Locher & Sage L. Graham, 289‒306. Vol. 6 of Handbooks of Pragmatics, ed. by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker & Klaus P. Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thelwall, Mike
2008 “Fk Yea I Swear: Cursing and Gender in MySpace.” Corpora 3 (1): 83–107. .
Walshe, Shane
2011 “ ‘Normal People Like Us Don’t Use That Type of Language. Remember This is the Real World’. The Language of Father Ted: Representations of Irish English in a Fictional World.” Sociolinguistic Studies 5 (1): 127–148. .
Wharton, Tim
2016 “That Bloody So-and-So Has Retired: Expressives Revisited.” Lingua 175–176: 20‒35. .
Cited by
Cited by 15 other publications
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed
2022. The “menstruating” Muslim Brotherhood: taboo metaphor, face attack, and gender in Egyptian culture. Social Semiotics► pp. 1 ff.
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed
2022. Taboo metaphtonymy, gender, and impoliteness: how male and female Arab cartoonists think and draw. Social Semiotics► pp. 1 ff.
Alba-Juez, Laura
2021. Affect and Emotion. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 340 ff.
Bednarek, Monika
2019. On swearing. In Creating Dialogue for TV, ► pp. 44 ff.
Fägersten, Kristy Beers & Monika Bednarek
2022. The evolution of swearing in television catchphrases. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 31:2 ► pp. 196 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.