From Knobhead to Sex Goddess

Abstract

Swear words represent an important social vehicle for human communication that beyond mere insults are conventionally used for social bonding and bantering among other functions. However, to the best of our knowledge, no systematic typology of swear word functions has been proposed. In this article, such a typology is proposed in a top-down manner drawing on literature as well as bottom-up by analysing a concrete corpus of real-world sufficiently vulgar dialogues. For this first case study, the analysis is limited to English and the analysis of subtitles of a single movie. We found that specific types of swear words, e.g. bodily functions, appear across functions with some preferences, e.g. body parts are particularly utilised in jocularity, criticism, and anger. Furthermore, resulting data are represented as linguistic linked data, extolling the virtues of this format for fine-grained linguistic analyses, e.g. filtering and visualising all swear words pertaining to a specific function.