A word in a word: social perceptions of expletive-infixation

Abstract

Despite being one of the most ‘offensive’ swearwords in the English language, fuck (and its various derivations) is also, paradoxically, one of the most frequently uttered swearwords (Beers Fägersten 2012). A possible reason for this is that fuck can express a range of different pragmatic functions (McEnery & Xiao 2004) and social meanings (see Author 1, 2022 for a review), depending on language-external factors such as speaker gender (DeFrank & Kahlbaugh, 2019). Comparatively underexplored is the role of language-internal factors in the social meanings of fuck. This chapter examines the effect of expressive morphology (Zwicky & Pullum 1987), in the form of infixation, on how fuck is socially evaluated. The research aims to inform our understanding of how the social meanings associated with particular words can depend on their form and integration with other words. The chapter details a visual matched-guise task in which 139 participants rated hypothetical speakers on scales of funny, sarcastic, happy, and rude. Results suggest that the presence and well-formedness of swearing infixation influenced responses across all scales. The chapter discusses these findings in relation to previous work linking the attribution of social meanings like funny to a word’s structural markedness (Dingemanse & Thompson 2020).

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record