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    British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: do native British English speakers swear more –or differently- compared to American English speakers?

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2015) British ‘Bollocks’ versus American ‘Jerk’: do native British English speakers swear more –or differently- compared to American English speakers? Applied Linguistic Review 6 (3), pp. 309-339. ISSN 1868-6311.

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    Abstract

    The present study investigates the differences between 414 L1 speakers of British and 556 L1 speakers of American English in self-reported frequency of swearing and in the understanding of the meaning, the perceived offensiveness and the frequency of use of 30 negative emotion-laden words extracted from the British National Corpus. Words ranged from mild to highly offensive, insulting and taboo. Statistical analysies revealed no significant differences between the groups in self reported frequency of swearing. The British English L1 participants reported a significantly better understanding of nearly half the chosen words from the corpus. They gave significantly higher offensiveness scores to four words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants rated a third of words as significantly more offensive (including “jerk”). British English L1 participants reported significantly more frequent use of a third of words (including “bollocks”) while the American English L1 participants reported more frequent use of half of the words (including “jerk”). This is interpreted as evidence of differences in semantic and conceptual representations of these emotion-laden words in both variants of English.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): British English, American English, swearwords, offensiveness, emotion concepts
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Jean-Marc Dewaele
    Date Deposited: 07 Sep 2015 12:51
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:36
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12913

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