Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of fuck: The case of teenage British English conversation

Abstract

This study examines the pragmatic functions of fuck among British English teenagers in casual conversation in two youth language corpora from the 1990s and 2010s. It applies a corpus-pragmatics approach to explore how the ongoing weakening of the taboo strength of fuck in the perception of young speakers is realised in usage data. The major functions observed involve a predominance of idiomatic, emphatic and emotionally expressive functions. Conversely, usage associated with potentially abusive functions, including literal reference to sexual intercourse, is infrequent. Our observations are interpreted in the context of delexicalization and related long-term diachronic processes, whereby contemporary usage of fuck among teenagers is characterised in terms of semidelexicalized, pragmatically strengthened usage with weakened taboo status. The article also evaluates the interpretation of idiomatic usage from a functional perspective, and contributes to methodological considerations of the use of spoken corpora for pragmatic research.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.08.008
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > English Languages and Applied Linguistics
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Language Research at Aston (CLaRA)
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Health and Society
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Robbie Love: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing, Visualization, Project administration. Anna-Brita Stenström: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Writing – Original Draft, Supervision.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Casual conversation,Corpus pragmatics,Delexicalization,Pragmatic strengthening,Swearing,Youth language,Artificial Intelligence,Language and Linguistics,Linguistics and Language
Publication ISSN: 0378-2166
Last Modified: 04 Nov 2024 09:25
Date Deposited: 04 Sep 2023 15:32
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://ars.els ... 02163-mmc1.docx (Related URL)
https://www.sci ... 378216623002163 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2023-10
Published Online Date: 2023-09-01
Accepted Date: 2023-08-17
Authors: Love, Robbie (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-7212-1165)
Stenström, Anna-Brita

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