WTF is happening to fuck? Studying swearing with corpus linguistics

In British English, fuck has traditionally been considered among the strongest of swear words, but in contemporary casual conversation it is among the most commonly used, suggesting that its taboo status may be weakening. In this talk, I describe a methodological approach to the diachronic analysis of the pragmatic functions of fuck in the two editions of the Spoken British National Corpus, focussing specifically on teenage speakers. The study takes a pragmatic approach to the use of swear words, focussing on their emphatic and potentially offensive roles in dialogic communication, in order to explore whether there is evidence of weakening taboo status in the usage of fuck.

The major functions are idiomatic, emphatic and emotionally expressive, while usage associated with potentially abusive functions, including literal reference to sexual intercourse, is infrequent. These observations are interpreted in the context of delexicalization and related long-term diachronic processes, whereby contemporary usage of fuck among teenagers is characterised in terms of semi-delexicalized, pragmatically strengthened usage with weakened taboo status. In other words, contemporary usage of fuck by teenage speakers is resemblant of a relatively mild swear word rather than a strong one.