This essay will investigate male and female usage of four swear words: hell, heck, damn and darn. A minor part of the essay focuses on comparing real life speech (by using the Longman Corpus of Spoken American English) with scripted language in soap operas (the SOAP corpus). The main part of the essay focuses on a detailed investigation of the four swear words in the SOAP corpus to see how they are used considering gender. Preliminary hypotheses were both correct and incorrect. Even though it was true that women use the milder forms of swearing in the company of men, men however use the harsher forms in the company of women. Moreover, heck seems to be a very neutral swear word used by men and women equally. Hell was most frequently used by men, and darn was very frequent among women. Overall, there was very little female to female swearing, and the category with the highest instances of usage of three of the four swear words was in fact male to female.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-24093 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Mårtensson Vahlqvist, Sabine |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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