Before the research conducted by Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao(2004), there has not been any systematic account of swear-words in English. It may be because a lack of well-annotated corpus resources. However, the ...Before the research conducted by Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao(2004), there has not been any systematic account of swear-words in English. It may be because a lack of well-annotated corpus resources. However, the creation of BNC, which is a balanced and richly annotated corpus, makes it possible to explore swearing from various sociolinguistic variables, such as age, gender and education level. Based on McEnery and Xiao's research, this article applies similar methods to another English word-DAMN, a typical swear-word which frequently occurs in BNC and also in everyday language use. This article will make full use of BNC to explore a detailed distribute pattern of DAMN within spoken registers, within written registers and across these two registers. Besides, the article will also try to find out the limitations of corpus methodology.展开更多
Swearing constitutes an important part of daily language use. However, despite several previous studies with foci on the social and cultural characteristics of swearwords, a large part of it remains to be investigated...Swearing constitutes an important part of daily language use. However, despite several previous studies with foci on the social and cultural characteristics of swearwords, a large part of it remains to be investigated. With the abundant spoken language resources from British National Corpus(BNC), this article observes the pragmatic and collocational features of swearwords. Three social variables, namely, social class, speech domain, and gender were put under investigation to see how the use of swearwords varies with different speech social contexts. Meanwhile, the noun and adjective collocates of several frequent swearwords were separately sorted out and discussed. The data observed show that the use of swearwords is highly related to different social contexts, and there exits certain level of differentiation between different swearwords used as intensifiers which can be generalized lexicographically.展开更多
文摘Before the research conducted by Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao(2004), there has not been any systematic account of swear-words in English. It may be because a lack of well-annotated corpus resources. However, the creation of BNC, which is a balanced and richly annotated corpus, makes it possible to explore swearing from various sociolinguistic variables, such as age, gender and education level. Based on McEnery and Xiao's research, this article applies similar methods to another English word-DAMN, a typical swear-word which frequently occurs in BNC and also in everyday language use. This article will make full use of BNC to explore a detailed distribute pattern of DAMN within spoken registers, within written registers and across these two registers. Besides, the article will also try to find out the limitations of corpus methodology.
基金Key Research Project of the Social Sciences and Humanities of Shanghai International Studies University,China(No.2018114027)
文摘Swearing constitutes an important part of daily language use. However, despite several previous studies with foci on the social and cultural characteristics of swearwords, a large part of it remains to be investigated. With the abundant spoken language resources from British National Corpus(BNC), this article observes the pragmatic and collocational features of swearwords. Three social variables, namely, social class, speech domain, and gender were put under investigation to see how the use of swearwords varies with different speech social contexts. Meanwhile, the noun and adjective collocates of several frequent swearwords were separately sorted out and discussed. The data observed show that the use of swearwords is highly related to different social contexts, and there exits certain level of differentiation between different swearwords used as intensifiers which can be generalized lexicographically.
