Swearing in Irish English – A corpus-based quantitative analysis of the sociolinguistics of swearing

Schweinberger, Martin

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2018.03.008

Cited by 50 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In the 2010s data, it is also the case that males produce swear words more so than females (18.15 per ten thousand and 10.81 per ten thousand, respectively), within the context of an overall decline in swearing usage. This is in line with other studies (Beers Fägersten 2012;Schweinberger 2018); it has also been suggested that female swearing is "undoubtedly subject to more social censure" than male swearing (Stapleton 2010: 293) and is therefore likely to be less frequent. However, the reduction from male usage being 2.33 times more frequent than female usage in the 1990s to 1.68 times more likely in the 2010s requires further attention.…”

Section: Social Distribution 421 Gendersupporting

confidence: 91%

“…There is also the sharp decline in swear word usage among the late 20s/early 30s, which appears in both subsets (this is also observed in Irish English by Schweinberger 2018). When discussing age grading (specifically in the case of Swearing in informal spoken English FUCK), McEnery and Xiao (2004) suggest that swearing drops rather steeply at middle age, due to this being the typical age at which adults become parents and are said to be less likely to swear due to often being in the presence of children.…”

Section: Agementioning

confidence: 60%

“…One reason for this may be that I have analysed a restricted set of swear words, while the studies discussed by Jay (2009b) may have considered larger sets of taboo words. However, Schweinberger (2018), who, similarly, focussed on a small set of swear words (22 in total), reported a rate of 0.16% in a corpus of Irish English informal private dialogues, so rates lower than 0.3% in casual conversation are not unprecedented. Therefore, it would be difficult to claim that the difference in frequency between the corpora is suggestive of some wider decline in the use of swear words among British English speakers; both rates appear to be close to what might be expected.…”

Section: Wholesale Frequency Analysismentioning

confidence: 98%

“…McEnery's ( 2006) study looked at a range of 'bad language' beyond swear words and was one of the first empirical investigations into the phenomenon of swearing in informal spoken English. Subsequently, these findings were echoed in Schweinberger's (2018) study of swearing in Irish English, using the private dialogue section of the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) (Kallen and Kirk 2008). He found that young adult speakers used swear words most frequently, and that "men used a significantly higher mean rate of swear words compared to women" (p. 11).…”

Section: Corpus Research Into Swearing In Spoken Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

Love

2021

Text &Amp; Talk

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This paper investigates changes in swearing usage in informal speech using large-scale corpus data, comparing the occurrence and social distribution of swear words in two corpora of informal spoken British English: the demographically-sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014); the compilation of the latter has facilitated large-scale, diachronic analyses of authentic spoken data on a scale which has, until now, not been possible. A form and frequency analysis of a set of 16 ‘pure’ swear word lemma forms is presented. The findings reveal that swearing occurrence is significantly lower in the Spoken BNC2014 but still within a comparable range to previous studies. Furthermore, FUCK is found to overtake BLOODY as the most popular swear word lemma. Finally, the social distribution of swearing across gender and age groups generally supports the findings of previous research: males still swear more than females, and swearing still peaks in the twenties and declines thereafter. However, the distribution of swearing according to socio-economic status is found to be more complex than expected in the 2010s and requires further investigation. This paper also reflects on some of the methodological challenges associated with making comparisons between the two corpora.

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Section: Social Distribution 421 Gendersupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Agementioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Wholesale Frequency Analysismentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Corpus Research Into Swearing In Spoken Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

Love

2021

Text &Amp; Talk

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“…By definition, swearing speech/swearing words are produced with the purpose to convey one's emotional state to the listeners [3] and contain offensive and obscene language [4]. In line with that, swearing speech is an intriguing phenomenon as speakers use curse words to express their emotional states and it is therefore worth examining the issue of who the users of 'bad language' are in relation to their social identities and roles in society [5]. Furthermore, [6] swearing speech can be divided into two kinds of swearing: (a) annoyance swearing, where the swearer stressing the words with great transgression, and (b) social swearing, where the swearer is relaxed in expressing those words.…”

Section: B Swearing Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpus Based Analysis of Swearing Speech of lNgapak Tegalanr Language in Tegal Movies

Zulfa¹,

Widodo²

2018

Proceedings of the International Conference of Communication Science Research (ICCSR 2018)

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The Ngapak Tegalan language is deemed as a unique language in Indonesia. The Ngapak Tegalan language has special prosody, dialect (gruff) and various vocabularies (from the mild, moderate, and rude to the offensive). By the gruff prosody and dialect identically, the used dictions become as if swearing speech and cause the view that Tegal people like swearing. Reflecting on the movies produced by the Tegal city government, entitled Dalim D'Tegal Maritim (2013), NIK (2014), Meniti Senja (2015) and Senyum Niki (2016), the actors often used swearing speech in their dialogues. Those movies told about social lives and the facts in Tegal, such as the maritime which forms the identity of Tegal, the socialization of electronic ID card creating, the socialization of a health service post for the elderly and the socialization of a complaint service center for household problems. The collected data were the conversations in those movies using AntConc (Corpus analysis based application). There were some categories of swear words based on some situations such as expressing annoyance, insulting, ridiculing, asking to go away, asking confirmation and so forth. One of them was "Sikah! Badeg, anak kurang ajar! Merad!" included to the swearing speech of expressing the annoyance. From this analysis, it can extend our knowledge about the one of indigenous people language varieties and the classification of function and at what state the swearing speech is expressed.

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Directives and Politeness in SPICE-Ireland

Ronan

2022

Corpus Pragmatics

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Working from the perspective of Leech’s (The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014) modification to Blum-Kulka et al.’s (Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ, Ablex, 1989) approach to classifying requests, this study investigates how far impositive directive speech acts are found in spoken Irish English, a variety of English which is well-known for avoiding face threats. The study further investigates how these impositive speech acts are influenced by the genre of the spoken category. In order to do so, this study uses data from the southern component of SPICE-Ireland, a pragmatically annotated corpus of spoken Irish English, and analyses data from six different genres of spoken conversation: Broadcast discussions, Business transactions, Classroom discussions, Face-to-face conversations, Legal presentations and Telephone conversations. These genres are classified in terms of the concepts of ‘language of distance’ versus ‘language of immediacy’. In the data, impositive strategies are frequently found, particularly so in private settings of ‘language of immediacy’. In the more public and formal settings of ‘language of distance’, by contrast, indirect strategies are more prominent.

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Swearing in Irish English – A corpus-based quantitative analysis of the sociolinguistics of swearing

Cited by 50 publications

References 17 publications

Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

Corpus Based Analysis of Swearing Speech of lNgapak Tegalanr Language in Tegal Movies

Directives and Politeness in SPICE-Ireland

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