Cursing in America
A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts, in the movies, in the schoolyards and on the streets
- Author(s): Timothy Jay 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, Massachusetts
- Format: PDF
- Publication Date January 1992
- e-Book ISBN: 9789027274052
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/z.57
This is the first serious and extensive examination of American cursing from a psycholinguistic-contextual point of view. Several field studies and numerous laboratory-based experiments focus on the relationship between cursing and language acquisitions, anger expresssion, gender stereotypes, semantics, and offensiveness. Censorship, language content of motion pictures, First-Amendment fighting words, sexual harassment, obscene phone calls, and cursing at public schools are analyzed and related to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic data. Many tables of word-by-word data provide empirical evidence of frequency of occurrence, degree of offensiveness, gender of speaker and age of speaker influences on obscene language usage in America. A "must" for language reference collections.
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