| Abstract: | 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. |
