Fuck has always been one of the strongest and most controversial taboo words in the English language, considered insulting and unacceptable in formal and polite communicative contexts. Originally a verb, nowadays it has gained more grammatical flexibility, undergoing a conversion to any part of speech and, in its morphological variants (inflectional, derivational and compounded) has acquired the function of emotive stress amplifier, ‘desemantised’ of its original denotative meaning and used with a mainly pragmatic value in different situations. From the observation of its occurrences in a corpus from a qualitative perspective, but also from various authoritative sources (dictionaries, various existing literature), enquires on the web and also from personal experience among English speakers in different communicative contexts, we have noticed an ever-increasing occurrence of ‘fuck’ belonging to various parts of speech and expressing different pragmatic functions and have observed the collocations in which the lemma occurs. The results are presented in the present paper together with some general observations on the acceptability of the f-word and its use in the language classroom.
L'utilizzo di parole tabù nell'inglese di oggi: il caso di 'fuck' nella comunicazione ordinaria e nella classe di inglese
CORDISCO, Mikaela
2008-01-01
Abstract
Fuck has always been one of the strongest and most controversial taboo words in the English language, considered insulting and unacceptable in formal and polite communicative contexts. Originally a verb, nowadays it has gained more grammatical flexibility, undergoing a conversion to any part of speech and, in its morphological variants (inflectional, derivational and compounded) has acquired the function of emotive stress amplifier, ‘desemantised’ of its original denotative meaning and used with a mainly pragmatic value in different situations. From the observation of its occurrences in a corpus from a qualitative perspective, but also from various authoritative sources (dictionaries, various existing literature), enquires on the web and also from personal experience among English speakers in different communicative contexts, we have noticed an ever-increasing occurrence of ‘fuck’ belonging to various parts of speech and expressing different pragmatic functions and have observed the collocations in which the lemma occurs. The results are presented in the present paper together with some general observations on the acceptability of the f-word and its use in the language classroom.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
