The Devil is in the schema

Abstract

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.