Cover not available
Article published In:
Sex, Death & Politics: Taboos in Language
Edited by Melanie Keller, Philipp Striedl, Daniel Biro, Johanna Holzer and Benjamin Weber
[Pragmatics & Cognition 28:1] 2021
► pp. 87–137

The sound of taboo

Exploring a sound-meaning association in swear words of English and French

| Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 – STL – Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille , France
| Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 – STL – Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille , France
Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved, as well as two explanations in terms of iconicity (plosives may be associated with “violation of hearer’s space”, or unsonorous consonants may be associated with “aggression”). This unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve an emotional-contextual, non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected ways.
Keywords: swear words, taboo words, systematicity, sound symbolism, iconicity, taboo, swearing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Case study 1: Sound regularities for English and French swear words
    • 2.1Data and method
    • 2.2Results
  • 3.Case study 2: Sound regularities for English and French fictional swear words
    • 3.1Data and method
    • 3.2Results for fictional swear words
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Sound-symbolic associations
    • 4.2A conceptual or emotional/contextual meaning
    • 4.3Possible emotional/contextual meanings
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.20021.val
References (27)
Primary sources
Larousse. 2020. Dictionnaire français-anglais. [URL]. (28 January, 2020)
New, Boris & Christophe Pallier. 2019. Lexique. [URL]. (19 June, 2019.)
University of Western Australia, School of Psychological Science. 1997. MRC Psycholinguistic Database. [URL]. (19 June, 2019.)
Oxford University Press. 2020. OED Online. [URL]. (28 January, 2020.)
ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine. 2002. TLFi : Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé. [URL]. (19 June, 2019.)
Wikipedia, 2004. Vocabulaire du Capitaine Haddock. [URL]. (31 May, 2019.)
Wiktionary, 2009. Appendix: Fictional English swear words. [URL]. (31 May, 2019.)
References
Bergen, Benjamin K. 2004. The psychological reality of phonaesthemes. Language 80(2). 290–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016. What the F: What swearing reveals about our language, our brains, and ourselves. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Broadcasting Standards Authority. 2010. What not to swear: The acceptability of words in broadcasting. [URL]. (28 January, 2020.)
Childs, G. Tucker. 2001. Research on ideophones, whither hence? The need for a social theory of ideophones. In F. K. Erhard Voeltz & Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.), Ideophones, 63–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egbokhare, Francis O. 2001. Phonosemantic correspondences in Emai attributive ideophones. In F. K. Erhard Voeltz & Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.), Ideophones, 87–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Finkelstein, Shlomit Ritz. 2018. Swearing as emotion acts. In Andrea Pizarro Pedraza (ed.), Linguistic taboo revisited: Novel insights from cognitive perspectives, 108–139. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Languages in the Americas. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez, Elkin Darío, Roger Levy & Benjamin K. Bergen. 2016. Finding non-arbitrary form-meaning systematicity using string-metric learning for kernel regression. In Katrin Erk & Noah A. Smith (eds.), Proceedings of the 54th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 11. 2379–2388. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haiman, John. 2018. Ideophones and the evolution of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. N.d. Hergé à propos du capitaine Haddock. [Hergé on Captain Haddock] [URL]. (6 June, 2019.)
Janschewitz, Kristin. 2008. Taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral word norms. Behavior Research Methods 40(4). 1065–1074. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Millwood-Hargrave, Andrea. 2000. Delete expletives? Ofcom. [URL]. (28 January, 2020.)
Parker, Steve. 2008. Sound level protrusions as physical correlates of sonority. Journal of Phonetics 36(1). 55–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reilly, Jamie, David Biun, H. Wind Cowles & Jonathan Peelle. 2008. Where did words come from? A linking theory of sound symbolism and natural language evolution. Nature Precedings. [URL]. (4 June, 2019.) DOI logo
Rouayrenc, Catherine. 1996. Les gros mots. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Sidhu, David M., Kristen Deschamps, Joshua S. Bourdage & Penny M. Pexman. 2019. Does the name say it all? Investigating phoneme-personality sound symbolism in first names. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148(9). 1595–1614. DOI logo (7 October, 2019.)Google Scholar
Vallery, Robin. 2019. The sound of taboo: Exploring phonopragmatic associations of swear words in English and in French. Unpublished MA thesis, University de Lille, France
Voeltz, F. K. Erhard & Christa Kilian-Hatz. 2001. Introduction. In F. K. Erhard Voeltz & Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.), Ideophones, 1–8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whissell, Cynthia. 1999. Phonosymbolism and the emotional nature of sounds: Evidence of the preferential use of particular phonemes in texts of differing emotional tone. Perception and Motor Skills 89(1). 19–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yardy, Brandon John. 2010. Sound symbolism, sonority, and swearing: An affect induction perspective. Lethbridge: The University of Lethbridge dissertation. [URL]. (4 June, 2019.)
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Lev-Ari, Shiri & Ryan McKay
2023. The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 30:3 ► pp. 1103 ff. DOI logo
Stapleton, Karyn., Kristy. Beers Fägersten, Richard. Stephens & Catherine. Loveday
2022. The power of swearing: What we know and what we don’t. Lingua 277 ► pp. 103406 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. 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.