Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
(Linguistics)
Bc. Lucie Šindelářová
When It’s Damn Good: A Morphosyntactic Analysis of DAMN and a Corpus-Based Study of Its Semantic Prosody
Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Wei-lun Lu, PhD.
2016
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my supervisor Wei-lun Lu, PhD. for the guidance he kindly provided me with and also my family for their endless patience and support.
Notification
The following text consists of profane and obscene language. The thesis is of a strictly academic and professional character and the use of such language is solely due to the purpose of the thesis which is to analyse a profane phenomenon. I decided not to use asterisks for two reasons. First, the profane content is analysed from a strictly scientific point of view without any other intention than to portray it and second, because asterisks would be all over the place.
Should it present too disturbing an experience, I suggest they not continue reading. I hope that the readers will bear this in mind and forgive me for the excessive amount of swearing.
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Table of contents
Notification ...... 4 Introduction ...... 7 PART I ...... 10 1. SWEARING ...... 10 1.1 What the **** is swearing? ...... 10 1.2 Typologies of swearing ...... 13 2 DAMN ...... 16 2.1 From damnation to dammit! ...... 17 2.2 Morphological aspects peculiarities of damn ...... 18 2.2.1 Adjectival damn ...... 19 2.2.1.1 Subjectification ...... 24 2.2.2 Damn as a noun ...... 26 2.2.2.1 Idiomatic damn ...... 28 2.2.3 Adverbial damn ...... 30 2.2.4 Damn! Interjection ...... 31 2.2.5 Damn as a (quasi) verb? ...... 32 2.2.5.1 Cursing construction ...... 38 2.2.6 Expletive derivation ...... 40 PART II ...... 42 3 METHODOLOGY ...... 42 3.1 Swearing as the good guy ...... 42 3.2 Semantic prosody ...... 44 3.3 Web-crawled corpora ...... 46 3.4 Sketch Engine ...... 47 3.5 Research Design ...... 48 3.5.1 Sampling ...... 50 4 HYPOTHESES ...... 53 5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ...... 54 5.1 Damn in ETT ...... 55 5.2 Damn in the BNC ...... 58 5.3 Multiple premodification ...... 61 5.4 Corpora combined ...... 65
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6 NOTES ON FURTHER RESEARCH AND SOME IMPROVEMENTS ...... 66 7 CONCLUSION ...... 68 List of abbreviations used ...... 71 List of figures and tables ...... 72 References ...... 73 Abstract ...... 82 Resumé ...... 83
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Introduction
If it were to be claimed that the kind of language from the title of this work neither belongs on academic shelfs nor does it need to or should be studied, such a claim would be wrong. Speaking of the first proposition, fuck is as much of a word as butterfly.
Curiosity about language and a tiny bit of sense of humour are the only traits required.
After all, it would be a shame not to study something so complex, so frequently used and surrounded by so many 'hows' and 'whys' just because of an unfavourable label. And speaking of the second?
Foul language, swearing or vulgar tongue are not topics as avoided as it could seem. Linguists have devoted quite some time to study these phenomena from different perspectives. Majority of the material available is primarily concerned with mostly non- grammatical topics such as sociolinguistics, social variables and pragmatic aspects (Jay,
1992, 1999; Jay & Janschewitz, 2008; Stenström, 2006; Ljung, 2009; Fägersten, 2012;
Wang, 2013), psycholinguistics (Jay, 1999), historical development (Hultin, 2008;
Mohr, 2013; Hughes, 2015; McEnery, 2006) and classifications and typologies of 'bad language' (Montagu, 1967; Hirsch, 1985; Jay, 1992; McEnery, Baker & Hardie, 2000;
Ljung, 2011). Concerning vulgar language and its members studied as grammatical elements, there are two main publications to mention.
Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd Or 34th Birthday (Zwicky, Salus, Binnick & Vanek, 1992) is a collection of essays on different morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of swear words and they are not limited to English. The essays review and comment on some of the idiosyncrasies of vulgar tongue which are a reoccurring trait of this part of language.
Pinker in chapter The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television (2007) from his book also shortly comments on some of the not so easily classifiable words and phrases.
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Nevertheless, both works deal with specific constructions rather than taking one word in particular and studying it in all the constructions it can possibly appear in. I believe this approach to be just as helpful in determining some patterns of swear words in general as studying one construction with the application of different swear words (such as give a shit/damn/fuck, bloody/damn/fucking awesome, damn/fuck it!, etc.). Investigating one word in different linguistic contexts can uncover some general intrinsic features and characteristics which cause that word to appear in different swearing structures. There is so far only one publication focusing on a single swear word and that is The F-word by J.
Sheidlower (2009). My thesis contributes with a thorough study of one of the most popular swear words, which can due to its similarities in morphosyntactic and semantic features also help discover patterns applicable to a larger group of words and not just to damn alone.
Furthermore, empirical research on swear words is to a large extent limited to frequency of use among swear words or within various social context, frequency based on illocutionary act, or level of offensiveness. Considering that swear words and foul language in general are often referred to as 'bad language', looking into how bad it really is nowadays is a relevant issue to investigate and using semantic prosody seems a logical direction. While the study of intensifiers and their semantic prosody is not new to research, semantic prosody and swear words are. Let me now briefly present the content of this thesis.
The theoretical part (Part I) introduces the notion of swearing, emphasises its place in everyday speech, and offers a classification of the functions swear words can carry in different contexts and syntactic structures. The remaining part of the theoretical portion of this work is concerned with one of the most frequently used swear words - damn. It observes its flexibility in terms of word classes and attempts to explain some of
8 its unusual and incoherent patterns also trackable in other popular swear words. This is achieved with the help of the earlier mentioned linguists and their insights, major dictionaries, grammatical books, and corpora.
The practical part (Part II) presents quantitative corpus research studying the semantic prosody of the structure damn + adjective in two corpora; enTenTen13 and the
British National Corpus. It also briefly investigates cases of multiple intensification in the aforementioned structure and its frequency.
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PART I
1. SWEARING
What the **** is swearing?
Not only are most of us familiar with the concept of swearing but we are also its more or less active users. Jay (2009) estimated that an average speaker utters 80-90 swear words per day1. English swearing lexicon consists of a seemingly endless list of mild, not so bad, bad, worse, and the worst words and phrases. However, several studies on the frequency of swear words conducted between 1986 and 2006 (as cited in Jay, 2009) show that 10 of the most popular ones cover 80% of what we actually use when we swear. Those 10 infamous words are fuck, shit, hell, damn, goddamn, Jesus Christ, ass, oh my god, bitch and sucks (p. 156). Wajnryb’s (2005) 'Dirty Dozen' core swear words includes fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch, bastard, ass, hell, damn, fart, crap, and dick (p. 24).
Swearing has its dark place in society and is certainly not a recent invention. Foul language and its taboo date back not decades or hundreds but possibly thousands of years to the period before Christ2. Note that what we define as foul language or swear words today is strikingly different from what these expressions constituted in the past3. It is apparent that to scandalize with words has been mankind’s forte for quite some time4.
But what is swearing?
1 This makes up on average 0,5-0,7% of everything we say per day. Even though such an amount may seem negligible, Jay is quick to point out that in contrast, personal pronouns in plural form account for 1% of our daily speech (2009, pp. 155-156). 2 To read more about the history of foul language I recommend Melissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing and The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment by Jeremy F. Hultin. 3 What can be considered a sensitive topic in one culture might be dealt with in a straightforward way in another. The same applies to swear words throughout time. "Oaths have come a long way from the days of the Middle ages when by God’s bones would have been more shocking than cunt" (Mohr, 2013, p. 8). 4 It is unfortunately impossible to state precisely when the first examples of swearing occurred since the freedom of speech and the press were not exactly swear-friendly. 10
Swearing is "rude or offensive language that someone uses, especially when they are angry" (CLD). This definition seems straight forward, yet the precise criteria for what constitutes a swear word are hard to determine for they overlap from writer to writer, not to mention the struggle of categorising them as I am about to attempt in the following chapters. Nevertheless, having observed the definition of foul language as it is understood by various linguists and psychologists such as Montagu (1967), Jay (1992,
1999), Jay & Janschewitz (2008), Mohr (2013), Pinker (2008), Hirsch (1985), Andersson
& Trudgill (1990), or Fägersten (2012), there are three unique attributes which appear to be the most representative of this group and help to recognize its members.
First, swear words possess something which non-swear words lack and that is emotional weight. It can be an expression of surprise, hatred, frustration, joy, amazement, etc. Second, connotative meaning is the one primarily used within the group of foul language. One will rarely use damn in attempt to invoke a curse on someone or use shit to refer to excrement. Last, all swear words possess an aura of "inappropriateness and offensiveness" (Gati, 2014, p. 5). As a result, they can be (on different levels depending on their severity and social context) stigmatized, allowed with restricted use by authorities such as parents, or in specific environments completely prohibited by law.
Going back to emotional weight, several studies (as cited in Fägersten, 2008) prove that the most frequent tone of swearing is not charged with hatred or aggression as in "Fuck you, you twat". Social swearing used in conversations accompanying jokes, expressions of excitement, or sarcasm ("He was fucking nuts about the girl because he thinks she’s the shit.") and distressed tone venting frustration and stress ("Damn, I failed!") are the most common reasons1 behind the use of foul language (p. 101).
1 Fägersten distinguishes between social swearing with 8 different tones (humorous, empathetic, excited, anecdotal, supportive, sarcastic, serious, and surprised). Annoyance swearing comprises of distressed, angry, rebellious, abusive and desperate tone (pp. 101-108). Pinker (2007) has a more general typology of five kinds which more or less correlate with Fägersten’s: Dysphemistic (the urge to use the opposite of 11
Swearing sometimes does not have any particular reason and is involuntary.
Such is the case of Tourette Syndrome whose patients suffer from involuntary ticks, movements and uncontrollable swearing, so-called coprolalia. On the other hand, scholars such as Montagu (1967), Hultin (2008), or Crystal (as cited in Hultin, 2008) claim that certain languages such as Japanese, Malayan, or languages spoken in
Polynesia have little to no swear words in their lexicons1. Gender-specific use follows the established stereotype that men swear more than women and choose much harsher vocabulary2.
Unlike Tourette, for which there is no definite treatment yet, the instant cure for swearing is euphemism commonly formed by slight phonological modifications3 with examples such as dang, fox around, frak, fudge, shoot, or lady bits. The question is, though, whether not swearing is really 'healthier' since several studies 4 proved that swearing increases physical pain tolerance, strength, helps express emotions and create social bonds, vents frustration, and against the popular myths, people who like to swear are neither less intelligent nor is their vocabulary deficient. Whether the world would be a better place if there was no swearing is unsure. Nevertheless, since foul language is here to stay, it is worth studying this controversial phenomenon.
One question which may arise is how to call this phenomenon? Don’t expect a definite answer for there is none. Since research dedicated to this phenomenon has been
euphemism), abusive (synonymous to Fägersten’s abusive and angry), idiomatic and emphatic (synonymous to social swearing tones), cathartic (synonymous to distressed and desperate tone). 1 A short Google search reveals that this claim is not completely true. The concept of offensive language differs across languages based on what is perceived as taboo in each culture. While the examples of offensive language may vary, the criteria mentioned above apply the same. To read more about swearing in Japanese, see S. Maynard’s Japanese Communication (1997, pp. 97-102) or Wajnryb (2005, p. 224). 2 This perception of gender differences is supported by studies by Jay (1992), McEnery et al. (2000), McEnery & Xiao (2003, p. 505), Fägersten (2012, pp. 127-152). 3 For example a vowel change (shit->shoot) or a consonant change (damn -> darn) (Napoli & Hoeksema, 2009, p. 621). 4 Proven by works and studies by Jay (2009); Jay & Jay (2015); Stephens, Atkins & Kingston (2009); Stephens & Allsop (2012); Wang (2013). 12 until recently rather poor, there is no uniform way of labelling dirty language (Jay, 1999, p. 10). Like many1 of those analysing offensive language, I decided and will continue to refer to all dirty words simply as swearing or swear words.
There is obviously still a lot to explore in this dark corner of language and we shall start in the next chapter with a short introduction into the possible semantic functions swear words can fulfil.
Typologies of swearing
While different swear words show different syntactic properties, swear words as such represent a general semantic class which can be subcategorized into semantic classes just like can adverbs be subdivided into circumstantial adverbs of place or time.
Using larger corpora such as the BNC, McEnery et al. (2000) developed a specialised corpus consisting of swear words, racial, and sexual terms called the Lancaster Corpus of Abuse. Along with the corpus was established a categorization of swearing made of fifteen2 categories reflecting the semantic functions of swear words.
Similarly, Ljung (2011) too introduced a typology of 'functions' of swear words or "the uses that the swearing constructions are put to by the swearers" (Ljung, 2011, p.
29). Ljung points out that it is obvious that McEnery et al.’s (2000) categorisation concentrates not only on swearing but also on bad language in general even though most of the categories are concerned with direct swearing (p. 28). Ljung, on the other hand, specifically focuses only on insults and swearing at its best, primarily in exclamatory
1 Fägersten (2012), Jay (1992), Hirsch (1985), Montagu (1967), Mohr (2013), Dynel (2012), Hughes (2015), Wang (2013), McEnery et al. (2000) among others. 2 The original LCA (LCA 1.0) consisted of 6 categories. After an extension of the corpus and its revision, additional nine categories (+ unclassifiable shelf) were introduced in the new corpus (LCA 2.0) (McEnery et al., 2000). 13 environment. His typology consists of three categories (stand-alones, slot fillers, replacive swearing1) and thirteen subcategories as portrayed below:
Table 1 - Ljung’s typology of swearing
Subcategory Example
1. Expletive interjections Fuck!, Shit!
2. Oaths By God, For …sake(s)
3. Curses Screw you! Fuck you!
I’ll be damned!
alones 4. Affirmation and contradiction A: The lock’s broken - B: Fuck/Sod/My arse/The hell it is!
Stand 5. Unfriendly suggestions Fuck off! Suck my cock!
6. Ritual insults Your sister’s a slut!
7. Name calling (You) Cunt!, Prick!, Mental!
8. Adverbial/adjectival intensifier Fucking marvellous!
It’s a bloody miracle!
9. Adjectives of dislike That bloody fool!
You’re a fucking amateur.
10 Emphasis You don’t have to tell me every fucking
Slot Slot fillers . time!
Abso-bloody-lutely!, Why the fuck?
Modal adverbials I bloody well drank my beer!
1 Replacive swearing is "[…] taboo words that may replace almost an infinite number of ordinary non- taboo nouns and verbs which are given new literal meanings which are interpreted in terms of the linguistic and situational settings in which they are used" (Ljung, 2011, p. 35). Lie (2013) suggests shit as an example of a replacive swear word (p. 31). Since Ljung does not go into much detail about replacive swearing, nor does damn seem to belong in this category, it is not included it in the table below. 14
11 Anaphoric use of epithets A: What should I tell Jane?
. B: Tell that bitch I ain’t comin’!
12 Noun supports John is boring and Phillip is
. hardworking -> John is a boring son
of a bitch and Phillip is a hard-
working son of a bitch!
Both categorisations show how flexible swear words are when it comes to what they can express as well as how they can express it. Both aspects are analysed in detail in the following chapters.
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2 DAMN
There are several reasons for the choice of this particular swear word. Damn shares mutual morphological and semantic similarities with many of the most common swear words (I don’t give a damn/fuck/shit; Fuck/damn you!; This is fucking/damn awesome; We are fucked/screwed/damned; This is a fucking/shitty/crappy/damn situation; Fuck/shit/hell/crap/damn! I’m late!, etc.). Its analysis can, therefore, by cause of its prototypical character among swear words, serve to a certain extent a more general purpose and its findings are more likely to be applicable to swear words in general, as opposed to less common swear words which are less flexible both morphologically and semantically, and thus less representative of this phenomenon. It can be argued that fuck would due to its wide range of use and popularity constitute the best example, yet quite some attention has been devoted to this word and there is hence much more to explore about damn. Moreover, I am aware of the controversy fuelled by the presence of such language in an academic work and hence decided not to go full obscene, choose the lesser evil and go 'only' with profanity1.
The following supporting material will be used throughout this work. English
Corpora enTenTen [2013]2 further referred to as ETT (Jakubíček, Kilgarriff, Kovář,
Rychlý, & Suchomel, 2013), British National Corpus (BNC)3 (2007), the Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) and dictionaries Cambridge Learner’s
Dictionary (CLD), Oxford Learner’s Dictionary (OLD) and Merriam-Webster
Unabridged Dictionary (MWUD).
1 Profanity refers to language indifferent towards religion, its customs, or behaviour while not attempting to insult or degrade religion. Widely used examples include "For God’s sake!", "Jesus Christ!", "For the love of Jesus!" (Montagu, 1967; Jay, 1992). 2 ETT is an extensive, web-crawled English corpus of more than 19 billion words and almost 23 billion tokens. The TenTen Corpora are available in over 30 languages. 3 British National Corpus consists of over 94 million words collected mostly between 1975 and 1994. 16
From damnation to dammit!
Damn has been a proud member of foul language for hundreds of years It originates from Latin damnare meaning to condemn, fine, a derivative of damnum (loss, penalty), which developed into Old French damner and later, around late 13th century, in
Middle English to damnen, dampnen (Skeat, 2013, p. 127; Online Etymology
Dictionary, n.d; Wajnryb, 2005, p. 128). Observing Google N-gram1 results for entry damn in English, the history of its use has been quite unstable. Its peak was in the second half of the 17th century (though it is unsure what the ratio between the religious and the dirty meaning was). 18th and especially 19th century, marked by censorship in public as well as in print2, purification, and religion shifting to a secondary role in people’s lives, resulted in decreased use of damn, the lowest ever since its regular usage, and also in birth of euphemism substituting the unspeakable damn and its derivatives with socially acceptable darn, darn it, dash, dash it, tarnation, deuced, dang, dang it3, etc. (Hughes,
2015; Mohr, 2013).
With the rise of obscenity4 and scatology5 and diminishing fear of burning in hell, the era of profanity and blasphemy as the most fearful swearing areas was over. ETT shows that fuck is used approximately twice as often as damn. However, it is probable
1 Google N-gram Viewer is a tool generalising a graph of the frequency of use of a chosen word or phrase based on its appearance in corpora in a specific language (or a variety of English) over a selected period of time by Michel et al. (2010). 2 Swear words were generally completely absent from dictionaries between the 19th and the mid-20th century. Even some dictionaries of foul language used either hyphens or asterisks to avoid spelling of obscene words, did not assign the connotative, offensive meaning to them, or excluded them completely as in 1811 Dictionary of Vulgar Tongue or the Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (though they still portray a good account of examples of swearing from those times). 3 Most of the euphemisms of damn come from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century (Hughes, 2015, p. 166). 4 Obscenity "makes use of indecent words and phrases" (Montagu, 1967, p. 105). Obscene words are the ones with the highest level of offensiveness and include words like shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits (see George Carlin’s stand-up performance Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV). 5 Terms referring to processes and waste products of human body (e.g. shit, turd, crap, piss, piss off, fart) (Jay, 1992). 17 that if it wasn’t for damn, today one could not enjoy the ultimate inappropriateness and the unmatched feeling of saying fuck you!, the king of modern swearing world, since
Pinker suggests that it makes sense that this phrase comes from damn you (similarly to I don’t give a damn → fuck or I don’t care a damn → fuck) (2007; 2008, p. 23). Despite its lower usage as compared to the old days, damn still enjoys enormous popularity. It is one of the 5,000 most frequently used words (Davies, 2008). Moreover, its popularity among swear words is one of the highest (Jay, 1992, p. 143). Having once been a serious business, nowadays damn is considered a rather mild swear word. This drop from offensiveness to impoliteness is marked by the 1939 film Gone with the Wind whose makers managed, after breaching the Production Code and being fined $5,000, to push through today a famous phrase "Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn" (Hughes, 2015, p. 117).
Just like fuck and many other swear words, damn is extremely flexible, has developed numerous meanings and derivatives, and grammatically became almost an all- purpose word. Such a feature brings many possibilities of use but also many questions of its accuracy and grammatical correctness, which will be together with its linguistic aspects dealt with in the next chapters.
Morphological aspects peculiarities of damn
It was already mentioned several times that some particular swear words are controversial not only in their usage but also concerning grammatical structure. They represent a kind of a sui generis category as certain rules of their usage in sentences are not applicable to any other word. Furthermore, as suggested earlier, the function of swearing is not restricted to offence or anger as it might seem at first glance, but serves as a tool for plenty of expressions, many of which do not have any negative connotation.
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The following two chapters investigate the morphological categories of damn, its derivatives and some of their not-so-clearly definable examples, and also observe some semantic aspects of this multi-functional swear word.
2.2.1 Adjectival damn
Before proceeding to the analysis of damn, it is important to have a closer look at damned. It is the original adjectival form which got "swallowed in pronunciation and overlook in perception like ice-cream or mincemeat" (Pinker, 2007) and is far less common nowadays. However, the correlation between 'original' and 'adjectival' is relative here. Let us look at Quirk et al.’s (1985) understanding of the difference between participial adjective and past participle. If there is a 'by' agent, it indicates "the correspondence to the active voice of the sentence" (p. 414), and thus suggests a participle. Furthermore, "the participle interpretation focuses on the process, while the adjective interpretation focuses on the state resulting from the process" (p. 415).
Different types of sentences based on the word class of damned can be therefore distinguished: "The heretic was damned for his sins" / "she was damned for making such a bad presentation" and "I won’t make it on time because my tyre is flat. I’m damned!".
The first two sentences have a 'by' agent (God or a religious figure in the first and some audience in the second example) and they concentrate on process (of damnation and criticism). Moreover, they can be both transformed to active voice without any change in meaning. The last sentence about flat tyre does not have any 'by' agent and damned here represents a state resulting from the situation of having a flat tyre, and thus not making it on time. Swear words fuck and screw can also be found in a predicative position with the same meaning ("A flat tyre? Damn, now you’re completely fucked/screwed!"). It can be hence assumed that damned is classified as a past participle
19 in the first two sentences and as an adjective in the third one. Considering that the term was originally concerned solely with damnation by some omnipresent religious figure, the development of adjectival damn probably went from past participle across gradual loss of the 'by' agent and clipping of –ed to its contemporary use.
Damned can also function as an adjectival or adverbial emphasizer1 synonymous to damn. The intensifier itself can be in both adjectival and adverbial form levelled up to goddamn/goddamned/goddam. The tabooness of goddamn is much higher than that of damn (Jay, 1992, p. 143; Baudhuin, 1973) probably due to the presence of a religious figure and another syllable. But back to damn.
Damn can appear only attributively (1) as a modifier preceding a head in a nominal phrase (NP). Postpositive (2) and predicative (3) uses of damn as a subject/object complement are not possible.
1. That damn guy stole my phone!
2. *I don’t want to buy anything damn, I want only the good stuff.
3. *The bank is so damn! How can it close so early?
This absence of a predicative position is most likely due to damn functioning as an emphasizer and thus belonging to the attributive-only adjectives. (Quirk et al, 1985, p.
429). However, this is not the only not-so-adjectival aspect about damn adjectives.
Quirk et al. (1985) propose four features defining a true adjective. It must allow both attributive and predicative positions, must allow premodification by very and must have a comparative and superlative form (pp. 402-403). It is immediately obvious from
4-7 that damn does not fit in.
1 Emphasizer refers to a subgroup of intensifiers which add force or a heightening effect (Quirk et al., 1985, p.429). 20
4. Keep your damn money! I met that damn guy from yesterday again.
5. *Keep that shit. This money is/seems damn(ed) / *That guy from yesterday seemed
damn(ed).1
6. *You’re making some very damn money. *I met a very damn guy yesterday.2
7. Today I met an even damner guy than yesterday. I met the damnest guy ever
yesterday.3
Such a combination of possible features (attributive use applicable only) is by Quirk et al. (1985) recognized as a peripheral adjective and as an example with the same restriction they give utter which is, unsurprisingly, also an intensifier (amplifier to be precise).
It seems that it is the swearing feature making damn grammatically either a rebel or a sui generis loner (just like fuck, bloody or shit) because when we run the same test using literal meaning of the participial adjective damned as synonymous to cursed, two out of four rules are applicable since damned can be used predicatively (Jason is damned because of what he did).
Damn as a modifying adjective in a NP is mostly accompanied by a negative connotation of frustration or anger. However, while in some cases modifier damn does relate to the nominal head, in others it seems to be implicitly applicable to the whole sentence as an expression of dissatisfaction with the current situation of which the
1 Even though, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, a predicative position of damned is possible, the profane use here is not applicable since 'this money is/seems damned' cannot be interchanged with 'this money is/seems fucked/screwed', as it does not refer to 'being in a problematic situation'. Similarly, although money is/seems damned as in 'money cursed by God' is grammatically correct, it lacks emotional charge. 2 Very as an intensifier of damn is possible but occurs with adverbial damn which itself functions as an intensifier preceding adjectives or adverbs (see section Adverbial damn) 3 While damner and damnest/damnedest are grammatically correct terms, their meaning differs from that of profane damn. The superlative forms can function as two separate word classes. As a modifying adjective it means unusual and frequently collocates with thing ("This is the damnedest thing I’ve heard so far!"). As a noun it appears in phrases try/do one’s damnedest and its meaning correlates with try/do one’s best ("I tried my damnedest to play it cool but they could immediately tell how nervous I was."). 21 premodified noun can be but is not necessarily the source and which is, in cases when it’s 'innocent', used as a 'scapegoat', or as Pinker (2007) describes: ''Expletives indicate that something is lamentable about an entire state of affairs, not the entity named by the noun''. Fraser (as cited in Watts, 1988) refers to such a case of damn as a parallel pragmatic marker "which encode[s] a message in addition to that which is encoded in the utterance itself" and uses example "Take your damn shoes off the table!" where
"damn does not really modify the noun shoes but rather expresses what the speaker feels about the state of affairs encoded by the proposition" (p. 243). See the following examples:
8. Those damn stereotypes! They make people believe in absolute nonsense!
9. Fuck this damn player! It broke down the third time this month!
10. I can’t see a damn thing in this darkness
11. Stop checking yourself in the rear-view mirror and start the car, we gotta go. I said
start the damn car, Michael or we’ll be late!
In (8) and (9) damn directly concerns the stereotypes/player since they are the source of the speaker’s annoyance. (10) and (11) represent two examples of case where damn as an emphatic intensifier applies to the whole sentence for neither thing nor car causes frustration in the speaker. It is the situation of not being able to see anything (10) or of lack of time (11). These different relations are also reflected in the position of the adjective. Even though neither damn nor fucking can be used predicatively with the same sense, if infuriating/maddening are applied as a synonymous replacement of damn in both attributive and predicative position, the (un)relation between the modifying and the modified word is even clearer.
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12. Those infuriating/maddening stereotypes! They make people believe in absolute
nonsense. / Those stereotypes are infuriating/maddening! They make people believe
in absolute nonsense.
13. Fuck this infuriating/maddening player. It broke down the third time this month! /
Fuck it! This player is infuriating/maddening. It broke down the third time this month!
14. *I can’t see an infuriating/maddening thing in this darkness. / *I can’t see a thing in
this darkness and the thing is infuriating/maddening!
15. Stop checking yourself in the rear-view mirror and start the car, we gotta go. *I said
start the infuriating/maddening car, Michael or we’ll be late! / *The car is
infuriating/maddening, I said start it, Michael or we’ll be late!
This test suggests that damn1 as a premodifying adjective in a NP, which is due to its more distant link to the head more likely to allow neither attributive nor predicative substitution by another synonymous adjective while maintaining the same meaning, does not function as a negative booster of solely the succeeding nominal head but applies to the whole sentence as it simply only uses the succeeding noun to emphasise anger, annoyance, or frustration resulting from the current situation. It seems to emphasize whatever is the core of the proposition. In imperative clauses it can either strengthen the severity and importance of fulfilling the order where the emphasized word or phrase is directly connected to the fulfilment of the order (I said start the damn car, Michael!) or, similarly to interrogative or indicative moods, it can serve to emphasize the overall enhanced emotions resulting from the particular situation where the emphasized word or phrase is directly or indirectly involved in the cause of the heightened emotions (A: Let’s go. B: I can’t drive because I’ve been drinking. A: Fuck! Okay, give me the damn keys!).
Speaker A does not use damn to add intensity to his/her request of getting the keys but
1 The same works for emphasizers fucking or bloody. 23 to the frustration/disappointment/anger over the fact that he/she has to drive since speaker B cannot even though he/she was supposed to. The keys are indirectly involved here as they are from the car which speaker A has to drive now since speaker B cannot.
2.2.1.1 Subjectification
The aforementioned application of damn is related to subjectification. One of its representative scholars, Elizabeth Traugott, describes subjectification as a "mechanism by which meanings are recruited by the speaker to encode and regulate attitudes and beliefs" (2010a, p. 4). Traugott uses the idea of distinction between the ideational, interpersonal, and textual function1 in language by Halliday and Hasan (as cited in
Traugott, 2010b), the interpersonal level correlating with her idea of subjectification.
Swear words are certainly not unknown to subjectification. De Smet and
Verstraete (2006) describe intensifying use of adjectives such as bloody (and therefore most likely damn as well) as an expression of interpersonal subjectivity. Similarly,
Breban and Davidse (2007) list bloody as one of the five main types of subjective uses of adjectives. McGregor and Vandelotte (as cited in Ghesquière, 2010) mention bloody, fucking, flaming and damn as cases of a wide scope emphasizer, "a unit [which] applies over a certain domain leaving the marks on the entirety of this domain" (p. 304).
Furthermore, Traugott (2010b) studied expressions which underwent grammaticalisation from partitives to degree modifiers in one of their meanings (a piece of, a bit of) and
Ohashi (2013) found the same trace in intensifiers big time and all you want claiming that "intensification is concerned with the speaker’s interpersonal attitudes toward what is talked about and with achieving expressivity, both of which are manifestations of subjectivity". Considering that in "Give me the damned keys!" damned serves solely to
1 Traugott in her works refers to these as propositional, expressive and textual. 24 emphasize the severity of the whole situation, this case is also an example of subjectification and of grammaticalisation too as portrayed below.
Stage 0: Religious damnation (He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;
but he that believeth not shall be damned.1)
Stage 1: Expletive (Damn! Damn you!2)
Stage 2: Degree modifier
Stage 2a: (You’re such a damn bastard, Tony!)
Stage 2b: (The race was damn fast / it went damn quickly.)
Stage 3: Clause emphasizer3 (They thanked her while she didn’t do a damn thing
to help).
The shift of both meaning and function confirms the process of grammaticalisation. Stage 2 can be divided into two gradual processes. In the first one damn functions as an adjectival modifier preceding a NP (or a premodifying negative adjective as termed by McEnery at al., 2000). It still partially retains the original lexical meaning because first, a damned person referred to a sinner, someone with a 'negative aura' and second, damn in damn + NP in this sense only has a negative connotation while also functioning as an emphasizer synonymous to real, true or even as an amplifier such as pure, complete. Furthermore, as the shift expletive → degree modifier and degree modifier → clause emphasiser suggests, there is also a secondary grammaticalisation which Traugott defines as "the development of already grammatical material into more grammatical material" (2010, p. 8). While the use of damn as a degree modifier in stage
1 From Mark 16:16 in King James Version. 2 Whether this phrase really is an expletive is discussed later in this chapter. 3 This term refers to the use of damn analysed in this section, i.e. damn not relating to the modified noun but to the whole proposition. Since this particular phenomenon does not have any official name, I have borrowed and adjusted one of Ljung’s categories (2011) for easier comprehension. 25
2 has an intensifying function and has lost its lexical one (in stage 2b), the development into a clause emphasizer extends its function to the whole sentence emphasizing not just the succeeding element but the whole statement.
In conclusion, damn in its latest stages underwent subjectification and became a subjective modifier shifted from ideational to interpersonal function emphasising speaker’s attitude.
2.2.2 Damn as a noun
When it comes to matters of morphology, despite its immediate association with a verb or an interjection, damn might represent a noun too. There are less confusing cases of the words and phrases formed from damn which are used nominally, such as worth a damn, a nominalised adjective the damned referring to those sent to hell, the damnedest, and the first and today probably least used damnation (the act of casting someone into hell), and then there are more confusing instances of nominal damn. "I don’t give/care a damn" are semantically synonymous and indeed very popular phrases in expressing lack of interest or value1. Nonetheless, when observed separately, the two phrases seem to portray two different parts of speech.
"I don’t care a damn" resembles an adverb where a damn is a substitution for a bit/at all/in the slightest (a derivative of phrases such as "I don’t care in the slightest", "I don’t care a bit", "I don’t care at all", etc.). Furthermore, care can in this sense be used intransitively ("I don’t care"), which is in favour with damn functioning as an adverb here. On the other hand, not give a damn would, due to the presence of a determiner, due to being preceded by a transitive verb, and due to the possibility of premodification by
1 Bolinger identifies such terms emphasizing minimal relevance or value as minimizers (as cited in Napoli & Hoeksema, 2009, p. 633). 26 an adjective such as give a fat/first/twopenny damn, be classified as a noun realising a direct object. Nevertheless, direct object realised by a NP is able to become a subject in a passivised structure1 which is rarely the case with damn as will be shown later in this section.
Even though direct objects can be marginally realised by adverbial groups ("I don’t know when", "They told us very little") (Downing & Locke, 2006, pp. 508-509;
Dušková et al., 2009), this seems an unlikely scenario since if damn was to be understood as an adverbial group meaning in the slightest/a bit, not give a damn would have to be perceived as 'not give even a bit (of one’s attention )' / 'not give (attention) in the slightest'. To find a more probable version it is necessary to go back to the origins of this ambiguous phrase.
It was suggested in Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue 1785 that dam, a worthless Indian coin, is used in phrases "I don’t care a dam" or "I don’t care half a farthing" (p. 48) and since not care a curse or not worth a curse were already established phrases, it is likely that consequently, "I don’t care a damn" became a commonly used phrase (Gorrell, 1994, pp. 46-47)2. This is furthermore supported by the phrase not worth a (single/twopenny) damn3 which also establishes (lack of) value based on amount or currency. Another theory suggests that the transmission between give and care comes from Medieval Germanic languages where to give about (opposite of to being indebted to someone/something) developed into care about someone/something and is reflected, for example, in Modern Dutch in which not care about would be translated as not to give arse/wank about (Brauchen, 2015).
1 There are exceptions to the rule listed in Dušková et al. (2009). 2 According to Yule and Burnell (1903) give a damn comes from Indian damri and dam, coins with such a low denomination that they were used to refer to something worthless, of no value, and the Britons in India used it in phrase: "No, I won’t give a dumree!" (pp. 293-294). 3 Not worth a damn comes from the beginning of the 19th century (Online Etymological Dictionary). 27
Having reviewed some of the possible roots, it appears that the original grammatical notion of damn in the two phrases was that of a noun. Give a damn, maybe due to its more nominal-like appearance than in care a damn, is often premodified by adjectives (flying, single, silent, hot, good), determiners (half of, much of a, less of a, enough of a, tinker’s, wanker’s, god’s), and sometimes the clause has an indirect object
("nobody really gives it/you a damn"). Speaking of the give/care preference, give sweeps the board and its popularity is growing. While a few decades ago give occurred only about six times more often than care, now it is more than 50 times1.
2.2.2.1 Idiomatic damn
Let us put the detailed word-by-word categorisation aside now and look at the phrase from a more complex view, as an idiomatic phrase. Give a damn/fuck is non- compositional and it is not possible to derive its meaning from its constituent elements, and thus it forms an idiomatic expression. Vega-Moreno (2003) points out that not all idioms are as rigid and neither syntactically nor morphologically flexible as kick the bucket (e.g. spill the beans) (p. 304). The idiom give a damn/fuck are to a certain level flexible and allow some modification and syntactic changes.
Even though scarcely, direct passivisation (a damn + verb be + given) appeared twice2 in ETT with another hit for zero damns given3 and two hits for no damns given.
45 fuck(s) altogether were given in ETT in NP fuck(s) + (optional verb be) + given.
Considering that give a damn appears in ETT approximately three times more often than
1 The time contrast is based on the ratio between the frequencies of lemmata give and care succeeded by damn with set range of up to four tokens to the right in the BNC compared with ETT. 2 "You could still count on the fact that a damn was being given by me" (doc#2101216) and "with the exception of Fort Boyard, which was obviously screwed by network... not a damn was given" (doc#28242902). 3 That one hit actually corresponds to fuck though as the context shows that the speaker misinterpreted the acronym ZFG as zero damns given instead of zero fucks given (doc#25140010). 28 give a fuck, the ratios suggest that the allowance of passivisation in damn is the result of adoption of this particular feature from fuck. Damn can also be premodified by adjectives, quantified (almost exclusively by two) or give can appear in a non-finite infinitive clause as a qualifier of damn ("I am all out of damns to give"1). The fact that damn can appear in the environments above without losing grammaticality shows that give a damn is an idiom with rules not so strict.
Vega-Moreno also uses a distinction between three categories of idioms based on their level of decomposability into normally decomposable in which "each word independently contributes to the figurative interpretation" (pop a question), abnormally decomposable where the phrase as a whole is semantically related to its figurative meaning of the whole phrase (bury the hatchet), and non-decomposable idioms whose elements neither separately nor as a whole contribute to the figurative meaning (kick the bucket) (2003, p. 305). Since neither on their own nor as a whole do the elements of give a damn/fuck add to the figurative interpretation of not being interested, this phrase is to be classified as a non-decomposable idiom. Considering that the first two categories are much more flexible when it comes to semantic, syntactic, and lexical requirements than the non-decomposables (p. 306), the flexibility of the phrase give a damn is unusual and has acquired this trait probably due to its high frequency of use and also the high number of meanings, contexts, morphological categories, and syntactic structures peculiar to damn and swear words in general.
1 Doc#34517890 in ETT. 29
2.2.3 Adverbial damn
Adverbial damn functions as an intensifying1 element synonymous to polite very, really but also impolite fucking or bloody. Even though impolite, this adverbial usage for emphasis is together with vulgar idioms, according to Pinker (2007), the least offensive way of using swear words. It can be a modifier in an adjective phrase ("Peter is damn smart"), adverbial phrase ("He finished the race damn fast"), or NP ("Lucy is such a damn good runner"). When collocated with well and succeeded by a verb, adverbial damn emphasizes that verbal action ("You damn well knew I’d be late!", "The website better damn well make it available."). The opposite effect can be accomplished with the collocation damn near which functions as a downtoner (since it is synonymous with almost or nearly) and attenuates the effect as in ''they were damn near killed'', ''the film damn near brought tears to my eyes'', ''this shit is damn near impossible''. As opposed to almost or nearly, damn near seems to carry a stronger, emphatic meaning of an extreme which suggests that something was not absolute, complete, yet it was extremely close to being so, as if damn near the edge. Compare ''they almost/nearly drowned'' and
''they damn near drowned'' or ''this drawing is almost/nearly perfect'' and ''this drawing is damn near perfect''. This heightened effect can be, however, due to the stressed intonation and exclamatory character often associated with swearing which neither almost nor nearly possesses since both lack that extra emotional weight of a swear word.
Furthermore, damn sight can intensify comparatives such as "it was damn sight better when we could hear them". As one of a few words, it can appear in very/pretty/too
+ damn/ed + adjective/adverb structure (very damn careful, too damn stupid, pretty damn
1 With adverbial modifiers Quirk et al. (1985) distinguish between intensifiers and emphasizers in that emphasizers are used with non-gradable adjective (you are certainly welcome) (pp.447-448). Since damn can appear with both gradable and non-gradable adjectives (damn welcome, damn sure, damn impossible), the terms will be, as they have been so far, used interchangeably. 30 fast but not too much stupid/soon). On the other hand, it cannot stand on its own and therefore the answer to question "How well does he cook?" cannot be "Damn!" (or
Fucking!, Bloody!, etc.) even though saying "he cooks damn well" is completely correct
(Pinker, 2007). Damned (as well as goddamned)1 is also still used as an intensifying adverb which is, considering this form and the word class, very extraordinary since the
–ed suffix suggests either a verb or a participial adjective but in no way an adverb.
Speaking of the difference in distribution between the two intensifiers, goddamn/goddamned/goddam followed by an adverb or adjective occur in language very scarcely, approximately 26 times less often than damn/damned in the same environment2.
2.2.4 Damn! Interjection
Fortunately, not much attention needs to be devoted to interjectional damn because as opposed to the other classes, there is (finally) one which is quite clear and unambiguous (the question of whether damn + NP belongs to this part of speech is dealt with in the next section). "Damn!" functioning as an expletive and preferably succeeded by an exclamation mark is probably the most common part of speech associated with this utterance. The terms exclamation, interjection, and expletive should be distinguished3.
1 Despite its presumably minor frequency in contrast with damn, damned in ETT made up more than one fifth of the hits of this adverbial modifier. In case of goddamned it was even one fourth of the hits. 2 This value is based on the calculation of the amount of hits for the lemma of damn succeeded by adverbs (29,577 hits) and adjectives (119,420 hits) divided by the lemmata of goddamn and goddam succeeded by adverbs (712 hits) and adjectives (5,097 hits) in ETT. 3 Exclamation refers to one of the four sentence functions and describes an exclamatory utterance as a whole expressing strong emotions. Exclamation can be represented by one word (Shit!) as well as by "What a beautiful day!" and is perceived as a whole. Interjections express the same but as a word class classification. While these two terms are often used interchangeably, as opposed to exclamations, what is and is not to be classified as an interjection is often unclear due to the disagreement over whether multi- word utterances should still be analysed as interjections or even over whether interjection should count as a part of speech. Expletives refer to exclamatory utterances containing mainly profane or obscene words. 31
Similar to "Oh my god!" or "Christ!", "Damn!" can carry more than one function and based on the context and manner can serve as an expression of emotional states such as frustration ("Damn! This homework is gonna take me the whole night."), surprise1
("She can speak seven languages? Damn! Is that even possible?!"), joy ("Damn! We won!"), anger ("Damn, Johny! You fucked up again!"), etc. (Jay, 1999, p. 51). Ljung
(2009) makes a distinction between two kinds of expletive interjections: pure interjections, the 'post-hammer-on-thumb' or 'just-won-the-lottery' kind of interjections reflecting immediate reaction to something which does not have to be necessarily visible or obvious, and pragmatic interjections which in communication serve as pragmatic markers2 such as backchannels, emphases of one’s attitude, gap fillers or slot fillers3, etc.
(p. 157-158). Based on Ljung’s research, the frequency ratio between the two kinds of interjections was 20:80 respectively. Damn appeared once as a gap filler and three times as a slot filler (p. 168).
2.2.5 Damn as a (quasi) verb?
Linguistically, phrases fuck you, screw you, to hell with you or damn you (or whoever) belong to one of the biggest mysteries among swear words. While the common categorization of the swear words in such a phrase is a transitive verb in the imperative
Therefore, shit! is an expletive which belongs to the word class of interjections and as a sentence functions as exclamation (Trask, 1993). 1 A rather unusual phenomenon has recently occurred of damn spelt as dayum for a specific use of the word. Originally used as an alternate spelling of the Southern Drawl accent, this particular spelling has become associated with interjectional damn expressing (not exclusively but commonly) the feeling of surprise, joy or appreciation experienced usually by a man spotting a physically attractive woman as in "Dayum! Look at that hot chick!" or "Dayum! That ass!" (see the entry in Urban Dictionary for more examples). 2 While their presence has pragmatic reasons, Stange (2016) argues that the emotive function still outweighs the pragmatic one and that this group should be perceived as "emotive interjections with the additional feature of being fully integrated into discourse [...]" (p. 15-16). 3 The differentiation is based on Stenström’s (1994) turn-taking in conversational exchanges. While gap fillers can be a turn on its own (A: She drank seven of them. B: Damn. A: Yeah, in two minutes!), slot fillers are only a part of a turn (A: I met John’s girlfriend yesterday. B: Gosh I remember her, I think) (pp. 61-63). 32 mood, for there is an object but no overt subject, such an interpretation has many 'buts' from both syntactic and semantic perspective. In the following part some ideas of scholars on the categorization (or categorisability?) of these phrases shall be reviewed and also compared with dictionary approaches to fuck/damn + NP.
Quang Phuc Dong1 (reading out loud not recommended) in his paper English
Sentence without Overt Grammatical Subject (1992) observed and analysed mostly fuck
+ NP from every possible angle to see how much of an anomaly it represents and whether it is accurate to call fuck in this utterance imperative or even a verb. Since their features in this particular form seem to be uniform, I shall offer a short overview of Quang’s findings on fuck and apply his analysis to damn.
Two basic meanings can be distinguished in fuck + NP structure. In case of damn it is the denotative religious meaning (damn1), which would in "Damn that witch!" suggest a directive to condemn a witch, and the connotative swearing damn2 expressing a strong disapproval of the witch while being synonymous with fuck/screw/to hell with that witch. This semantic contrast of damn1 and damn2 is crucial for the two meanings show completely different levels of syntactic flexibility as can be observed below.
Damn1 (condemn, send to hell) Damn2 (fuck, screw, to hell with)
16. I said to damn the witch 23. *I said to damn that bastard!
17. Don’t / do damn the witch. 24. *Don’t / do damn that bastard!
18. Please damn the witch. 25. *Please damn that bastard!
19. Damn the witch, will you? 26. *Damn that bastard, will you?
20. Go damn the witch 27. *Go damn that bastard!
21. Damn the witch or she will cook your dog. 28. *Damn that bastard or I will
leave.
1 A very sound pseudonym of a Scottish-American linguist James D. McCawley. 33
22. Damn the witch and she will disappear. 29. *Damn that bastard and the sun
will shine.
The fact that 16-22 are completely correct but 23-29 ungrammatical and thus defy any possibility of damn2 to appear in an imperative structure suggests that swearing damn is anything but imperative. Furthermore, damn2 does not allow adverbials (*damn you tomorrow/in the city/fast/in twenty minutes) and since there is no evidence of a verb with zero tolerance of adverbials, it can be concluded that damn2 is not even a verb (p. 5).
1 Quang mentions a theory that damn2 + NP structure hides a deleted subject God but immediately rejects it since "Damn/fuck God!" is completely correct and the reflexivisation *damn/fuck/to hell with himself ungrammatical. There are further restrictions on the determiner in the succeeding NP which must be either generic (damn every cheater/all cheaters but *damn any cheater) or definite (damn this belief but
*damn a/some belief).
As Quang concludes, since the phrase in question has neither interrogative, nor declarative, nor imperative mood, since one cannot neither decline nor answer to it, and since it seems to have nothing in common with verbs, such "utterances simply express a favourable or unfavourable attitude on the part of the speaker towards the thing or things denoted by the noun phrase" (p. 6) and should be thus utterances subcategorised as epithets (and not sentences) including a lexical category of quasi-verbs such as fuck, damn, screw, to hell with, etc. (p. 7). Even though Quang does not offer a definite answer to what exactly damn or fuck in this phrase represent, he approached it very thoroughly and probably got the closest to doing so2.
1 From a personal communication between P. D. Quang and Barbara Hall Partee from November 1962. 2 Quang’s analysis has been cited in numerous works on not only English language, namely in Trask (1993) or Pinker (2007). 34
Let us now consider other linguists’ views. The entry for the term interjection in
Larry Trask’s Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics (1993) reads as following:
A lexical item or phrase which serves primarily to express emotion and which
most typically fails to enter into any syntactic structure at all. [...] A few
interjections, chiefly the profane and obscene ones, exhibit a very limited ability
to enter into syntactic structures1, as illustrated by Damn the torpedoes! and other
coarse but familiar locutions (p. 144).
The description categorizes damn 2 + any NP as an interjection which is in rare cases capable of appearing in a syntactic structure. While the definition does not offer any explanation as to what the elements in that structure represent, this is another proof suggesting that the structure is not analysable as a functioning set of rules.
Leonard Bloomfield in his Language (1935/1994) classifies damn it as an exclamatory minor sentence2 which as a whole belongs among secondary interjections3
(pp. 176-177). Although this does not help to solve the problem of what damn or it represent in terms of parts of speech, Bloomfield defines minor sentence as composing neither the actor-action structure nor an imperative structure (pp. 171-172), which rules out damn being a verb and confirms Quang’s views.
Dictionaries are putting grammar aside and taking a semantic approach to the classification of the phrase. MWUD describes fuck as a transitive verb which is
"sometimes used interjectionally with an object (as a pronoun) to express anger,
1 Amaka (1992) assigns this limited character to the fact that interjections exist as syntactically independent: "Since interjections do not enter into construction with other elements, they are not very well integrated into the clause grammars of languages" (p. 112). 2 Hurford (1994) uses God damn it! as an example of so-called clausal exclamations which are "formed more or less according to normal grammatical rules" but which are "not interjections at all" (p. 111). Since he does not proceed to say what they are, I suppose he suggests categorisation of the words as separate elements within a clause. 3 Ameka (1992) calls these interjectional expressions (p. 111). 35 contempt or disgust". Damn can be used either transitively to also express the above
(example given is damn him!) or intransitively to interjectionally express the same.
While the meaning correlates with Quang’s statement, the 'target' of the disapproval is recognized as an object (and its realization is restricted to pronouns which leaves one wondering whether damn2/fuck2 + noun as a head of NP belongs to a different category or changes something) 1 . This definition suggests that the phrase in terms of morphosyntax is a transitive verb realising a predicate followed by an object while in terms of semantics (based on the part of speech fitting its function), it is an interjection.
Even though CLD categorizes damn it as an exclamation used to express anger, the entry for verb reads "damn you/them/it, etc., to express anger with someone or something".
One can suppose that the class distinction depends on the meaning of it. Last but not least, OLD describes exclamation damn/dammit/damn it as "a swear word that people use to show that they are annoyed, disappointed, etc." Verbal damn (damn somebody/someone) is "used when swearing at somebody/something to show that you are angry". Furthermore, the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar uses damn you! as an example of expletive stating that "some expletives are formulaic expressions of a particular type which maybe grammatically irregular in some way. For example, Damn you! appears to be imperative in form but an imperative verb is not normally followed by you" (Aarts, Chalker & Weiner, 2014, p. 149).
One key difference can be observed among the proposed definitions above and that is the target. While the verb always aims at someone or something, the interjection does not direct the negative emotions towards anyone but simply lets them out and is thus closer to the interjection damn!. Although it can be certainly argued that the it in
1 I suspect that what is meant by pronoun is mostly it, as in fuck it. 36 damn it can represent as real a target as any other pronoun or a NP, several facts need to be considered.
First, while it can be an anaphoric reference to a NP with a neutral head as in
"The x-box won’t work, damn it!" (the x-box), I assume it is rarely the case when swearing that with it one actually refers to the x-box rather than using the curse as a phrase to express frustration with the situation of a non-working device or as a simple expletive (it is also more likely that the angry individual would use curses such as damn this thing/computer or damn thing/x-box as a premodifying adjective in case of directly referring to the object).
Second, it is sometimes the only possible way to express annoyance with situation expressed through a clause since the so-called object cannot be realised by an embedded clause (She is going to church. Damn it!, but *Damn her going to church/*Damn that she is going to church/*Damn the fact that she is going to church1) but then again, it is questionable whether the it actually refers to a situation and is not just an expletive.
Third, there is also not always a target which could be embedded in the object; it will be raining the whole week, damn it! The it in damn it is definitely not an anaphoric reference to the empty (prop) it in the first sentence.
Fourth, consider dammit. This utterance with practically the same frequency of occurrence as damn it2 is in all three dictionaries classified as exclamation/interjection.
Due to the loss of a pause between the two words, it ceased to be a phrase and lost the assumed V+NP structure which is, as Quang notes, the only feature making the theory of verb plausible (p. 5). It can be thus concluded that as opposed to Damn it!, whose word class is more ambiguous, dammit is an interjection. Or maybe damn it/dammit has
1 While the structure damn the fact that +finite clause should be technically acceptable since the clause is only an embedded qualifier of a noun clause, ETT returned only eight hits (0,00 in a million) and the BNC zero. 2 The ratio between damn it and dammit is almost balanced in both ETT and the BNC. 37 become such a common exclamation that the succeeding pronoun has lost any meaning and become completely empty. Quirk et al. (1985) mention a case of completely non- referring empty it which appears in idioms and vaguely refers to life such as "How’s it going?" or "We’ve made it!" (p. 349). If the meaning of life could be modified to 'life at the moment' or 'current state', the it in damn it could be added to this group.
Unfortunately, once again this theory is not plausible since the non-referring it is still reasonably flexible when it comes to question or negation neither of which is possible with damn it.
To summarize, the linguists agree that damn in damn2 + NP is not a verb. Quang
(1992) sees it as neither imperative nor even a verb, proposing that it should be treated as a separate subclass of utterances called epithet. Bloomfield (1994) identifies it as interjection constructed from a minor sentence while Trask (1993) defines the phrase as a rare case of an interjection able to enter into a very limited syntactic structure (but still an interjection). On the other hand, dictionaries consider damn2 or fuck2 verbs as long as the succeeding objects represent a real target such as person, thing, phenomenon or idea but apparently not a situation in general anaphorically referred to by it because this function is closer to interjections1.
2.2.5.1 Cursing construction
Before making conclusions about this structure and how it does not really fit in any composition, let us address this issue from a completely different angle and instead of trying to decompose the structure into separate units approach it as a single unit, a construction. The term construction refers to "form-meaning correspondences that exist independently of particular verbs (Goldberg, 1995, p. 1). I shall now draw on Goldberg’s
1 Wajnryb (2005), too, sees a difference in meaning between damn you and damn it (p. 16). 38 statement that "phrasal patterns are considered constructions if something about their form or meaning is not strictly predictable from the properties of their component parts or from other constructions" (p. 4) and review damn in terms of the aforementioned conditions. The structure damn2 + NP poses a whole series of unpredictable features (or rather limitations) some of which were mentioned earlier. First, while resembling an imperative structure, there is no distinctive commanding function recognizable from the sense of damn2. Second, imperative structures do not usually allow for the succeeding object to be you. Third, there is no supporting fact that there is an implicit subject you.
Last, the construction damn2 + NP appears in an extremely restricted environment and does not allow syntactic contexts which imperative structures generally do such as tag questions, reported speech, negation, or coordination with other sentences. This all has to do with the fact that there is a missing directive to fulfil and if there is no command to follow, there is no possibility for the syntactic contexts above to be grammatical.
Consequently, rather than to decompose the clause into elements with so many exceptions and restrictions to the general properties of that element, which place it beyond the periphery of that particular category, recognizing the clause as a separate construction with its own syntactic properties is more adequate here. As Goldberg points out, the advantage of construction-grammar approach is that it does not follow the notion that "syntax is a projection of lexical requirements" and that "the verb determines how many and which kinds of complements will co-occur with it" (pp. 10-11). This plays into the hands of swear words since the structures they form with and as verbal elements are extraordinary, to say the least.
I propose that constructions with damn differ based on the literal/non-literal aspect of its meaning. Damn1 and damn2 form two different constructions which, at first glance having the same syntactic structure, have different restrictions on their use and
39 completely distinct semantic functions. Damn1, i.e. the literal meaning of damn, appears in two-argument 1 constructions with agent X calling damnation upon the affected element Y. Damnation as a directive thus complies with rules of imperative mood
(Subject) + Verb + (adequate complementation). Imperative Damn1 construction would thus look accordingly: (Subject) + damn + direct object.
Damn2 appears in a construction generally formed as damn + direct object where the direct object represents the affected, the target of the disapproval, and permits the presence of you. The subject might be implicit but its form is unknown. In a more general sense, the semantic function of expressing disapproval or projecting negative emotions in a form of a curse could be represented by a 'cursing construction' Verb + NP such as screw you! or fuck their ideas!. Such a proposition avoids the necessity to categorise the internal elements in the clause while maintaining the validity and grammaticality of the phrase.
2.2.6 Expletive derivation
Not only is damn very creative as far as word classes are concerned, but it also allows the construction of quite a rare morphological phenomenon called expletive derivation (rather than infixation or tmesis)2. Expletive derivation refers to an insertion of mostly expletives (fucking, bloody, damn, goddamn, by God, the hell), their euphemistic alternatives (blooming, fugging, jolly), or neutral phrases (eternally, awfully,
1 While the subject can be left out in imperative structures, it is generally agreed that on semantic level it is still implicitly present in the clause. 2 It is questionable whether infixation is a legit term since infixation as such requires a bound morpheme to be inserted and modifies the meaning neither of which is the case with expletive derivation. Tmesis would be a more suitable candidate than infixation since it allows a free morpheme to be inserted. Nevertheless, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English it also requires the separated word to be a compound (Stevenson, 2010, p. 1867; Burchfield, 2000, p. 785) [even though the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar changes compound to 'word' (Aarts et al., 2014, p. 419)] which fits in cases such as every-bloody-body but obviously does not work for words like fan-fucking-tastic or dis-damn-creet. See Hegedűs (2013) for more about the misinterpretation of the term infixation. 40 absolutely) inside a polysyllabic word or between a generally interruptible collocation1 and functions as an emphasizer (McMillan, 1980). Damn and goddamn can construct intensified compounds such as incur-damn-able 2 , abso-goddamn-lutely, Ala-damn- bama, e-goddamn-nough, funny-damn-looking, inde-goddamn-pendent, etc. However, such compounds are not formed randomly and should follow a set of rules to create a phonologically 'sound' construction. Expletive derivation intensifies mostly polysyllabic
(rarely disyllabic) words (ad-bloody-vance, Lithu-fucking-ania), compounds (rail- bloody-way), combinations of numbers and letter (V-bloody-IP) as well as two-word forms such as names (West by God Virginia) and the insertion most often precedes either syllable with primary lexical stress (fun-fucking-tastic), with optional primary stress
(um-bloody-brella), or in some cases secondary or tertiary stress which can be easily raised to the primary one (kinder-goddamn-garten) (pp. 163-164).
To summarise, the chapters above provided some insight into the complicated nature of word class categorisation of damn. It investigated in detail five different word classes connected with damn through their mutual resemblance or semantic function.
The second half of this work (Part II) is devoted to a corpus-based study of damn and the semantic prosody it carries in specific constructions.
1 McMillan (1980) refers to the insertion of expletives between such collocations (e.g. all to X pieces, of X course, brand X new, too X much, shut X up, just as X well, etc.) as syntactic interposing. 2 Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (as cited in Hughes, 2015) states that incur- dam-able was 'the earliest known example of infixing'. 41
PART II
3 METHODOLOGY
Having provided the basics concerning swearing and its value in language, as well as its relevance in linguistics, and having introduced some of the problems and less visible boundaries in the morphosyntactic and semantic fields, I shall continue working with corpora as I did throughout this paper and test several hypotheses which were established and developed along with the theoretical background. The following sections introduce the chosen research and its methodology.
Swearing as the good guy
As briefly mentioned earlier, swear words and foul language in general are very often frowned upon, for obvious reasons. The reputation of these language daredevils is very negative, just like what they usually describe, what they usually emphasize, what attitude they usually portray and what feelings they usually raise when uttered. Notice the use of usually here. While it is generally agreed that swearing is, nicely said, unfavourable, this does not necessarily apply in all cases. First, consider the functions discussed earlier.
Members of foul language serve different functions and some of these could be evaluated as 'less bad' than others. While shouting cunt would be rated as well beyond unfavourable (most likely hundreds of kilometres away on an imaginary scale), muttering bloody hell after cutting oneself while chopping vegetable would be, on the other hand, in terms of strength and effect like comparing Hulk and a turtle. Adverbial boosters and emphasisers are even trickier. While in certain social settings their use will be undesired no matter what, in those settings where certain level of colloquialism and
42 freedom of expression is tolerated, adverbial boosters and emphasizers can turn from a negative, 'unwanted' element to a positive enhancement of a sentence, whether written or spoken. How is this accomplished?
Even though other functions from the typology of swear words from the first chapter are either intrinsically negative (such as personal or ritual insults, curses, unfriendly suggestions) or are used solely for those reasons (predicative/premodifying negative adjectives, anaphoric uses of epithets), some, such as adverbial boosters or emphases, are in itself neutral and whether they are negatively or positively charged depends on the word they are intensifying. Imagine the following dialogue: A: "I passed the state exam!" B: "No way! That’s fucking awesome! Congratulations!" Although fuck is considered a strong swear word1, in this particular collocation it is strong, but a strong intensifier of a positive adjective which in this particular context emphasises excitement and happiness. Nevertheless, the premodified element can be sometimes misleading, and therefore the study of context is just as important and indicative of the final attitude.
Since damn can function in the same environment as an adverbial booster, I decided to study instances of damn premodifying adjectives2 and observe their overall semantic prosody which is a phenomenon briefly described below.
1 On McEnery’s (2006) scale of offence (very mild-mild-moderate-strong-very strong). 2 The study was originally supposed to also include premodified adverbs but it was decided that the focus shall be solely on adjective because the majority of hits with premodified adverbs consisted of the phrases damn well, damn right, damn straight, damn near, damn sure, which neither function as adverbial boosters nor do they intensify adverbs with lexical function in a sentence. Although there would still be enough tokens left to conduct research after filtering out the phrases above, I assumed adjectives would be more representative anyway since after excluding all the undesired phrases, 21% of the original results remained (ETT generated 21,940 hits for filtered tokens of adverbial damn immediately succeeded by an adverb. After adding filter excluding immediately succeeding well, right, near, straight, sure, hits reduced to 4,690 and this number still includes miscategorised items). 43
Semantic prosody
The idea of semantic prosody (yet not labelled with this term) was born after
Sinclair (as cited in Stewart, 2010) noticed that the subject in clauses containing phrasal verb set in tends to describe 'unpleasant states or affairs' such as decay, despair, ill-will, rot, etc. Louw (1993) subsequently found the same feature in other words and started applying the term1 semantic prosody originating from prosody used in phonology. The use of the term prosody is not arbitrary at all. As he proposed, just as the realisation of phoneme depends on the co-occurring sounds and changes in order to 'prepare the mouth' for the production of the following sound, expressions such as "symptomatic of prepares
(speaker/hearer) for the production of what follows, in this case something undesirable"
(as cited in Stewart, 2010, p. 7) . Louw (2000) followed with the following definition of semantic prosody:
"A semantic prosody refers to a form of meaning which is established through
the proximity of a consistent series of collocates, often characterisable as positive
or negative, and whose primary function is the expression of the attitude of its
speaker or writer towards some pragmatic situation. A secondary, although no
less important attitudinal function of semantic prosodies is the creation of irony
through the deliberate injection of a form which clashes with the prosody's
consistent series of collocates". (p. 60)
Even though such a description might resemble that of connotation, Louw is quick to point out that the two terms differ in that connotation is more schematic and the semantic associations are embedded within the word while the evaluation of semantic prosody is collocation-interdependent (p. 14).
1 Louw (1993) states that it was Sinclair who started to refer to this phenomenon as semantic prosody during a personal communication in 1988 (p. 158). 44
Hunston and Thompson (1999) assign the presence of a particular semantic prosody to a tendency of a word to take on the semantic orientation of words which it most frequently co-occurs with (p. 38). In other words, if a word frequently co-occurs with words of phrases which would be generally rated as 'negative/bad' (death, famine, injury, hurricane, etc.), it can take on this 'aura' and be consequently associated with a negative semantic prosody and vice versa. Hunston (2007) pointed out one crucial criterion in semantic prosody evaluation and that is the necessity of a wider context. This was a reaction to (but not only) Stubbs (1995) who studied and determined the semantic prosody of the word cause analysing only co-occurring words. She criticised his approach as she claimed and also proved that the analysis of a wider context is more indicative of true prosody.
Corpus linguistics is a crucial discipline in terms of semantic prosody determination. Linguists use corpora to study the environment in which a specific word most frequently occurs and uses co-occurring items to identify the word’s semantic prosody, and thus make generalizations about its 'tone'. Different linguists refer to the opposing poles of semantic prosody using various names such as good and bad, favourable and unfavourable, positive and negative, negative and non-negative, etc.
Additionally, linguists have recently become interested in contrastive research conducting cross-linguistic studies (see Xiao and McEnery, 2006) (Stewart, 2010).
In the following corpus study I used the idea of semantic prosody and the fact that damn can have a 'semantic orientation' which might turn out to be very different from the general, notorious reputation. The choice of corpora, instrumentation, and steps taken are in detail explained in the following sections.
45
Web-crawled corpora
It is important to make a few notes about the corpus research itself and its organization. As far as the observed corpus is concerned, I chose ETT and the BNC. ETT is a web-crawled corpus, meaning that its data could be basically anything from the internet collected the year of its publication. This fact gives ETT three crucial advantages some of which can be, nonetheless, also a disadvantage.
First, its extensiveness. ETT consists of 22, 9 billion tokens with altogether 19, 7 billion words. The BNC, on the other hand, comprises of 112,3 million tokens with 96,1 million words which makes ETT almost two hundred times larger a corpus. While a large number of hits for lemma of damn would be ensured in both corpora, a search for more specific items while using only this corpus might not return enough data for a thorough analysis. Nevertheless, accessing large amounts of data from the web also poses problems such as the occurrence of duplicates and near-duplicates, which then impairs the relevance and reliability when it comes to generating statistics about word frequency
(Gatto, 2014, pp. 69-70). While this certainly is an issue, ETT, just like its previous version, underwent 'cleaning'1 of duplicated material before its launch (Jakubíček et al,
2013). Another possible complication might be the lack of metadata, such as information about the publication date of the data, etc. Nevertheless, since this particular research investigated only the frequencies of polarity of adjectives, no metadata was needed. If the purpose of the study was to use variables such as gender or genre for comparison, I would certainly have to turn to a different corpus.
Second, language changes constantly, across years, even decades, and since ETT was created almost twenty years after the latest instances of data in the BNC, it presents
1 See work on removing duplicate content from web corpora by Jan Pomikálek (2011) who developed the tools used for cleaning of the TenTen corpora. 46 the studied phenomenon in a much more realistic and precise light and its results gain on reliability and precision. This benefit would not be of such enormous importance if the phenomenon in question was a rather stable word or meaning which does not tend to undergo significant changes in a short time. However, as portrayed throughout the theoretical part of this work, damn is a constantly evolving word which keeps growing in frequency and flexibility while decreasing its level of offensiveness, which also has its consequences, and the more contemporary corpus1 to study it in, the more real-use- reflecting results.
Last, internet is a much less rule-governed environment. It does not pose as many restrictions on language use as, for example, newspapers, magazines and literature in general. Since the subject of this study is also a member of foul language and its use is thus partially limited in some media and completely avoided in many others, a source of date with much weaker boundaries of what can and cannot be written is a more suitable one and will hopefully provide more authentic results or at least a larger portion of them.
On the other hand, the fact that ETT is web-crawled means that there is no general information about the ratio between particular genres contained within the corpus. That is why I decided to combine both ETT and the BNC corpora. ETT can provide a large sample while the BNC provides data which was balanced.
Sketch Engine
Sketch Engine served as a search tool for this research. This software is used for the access to corpora and their data, management of corpus research, and much more.
Sketch engine is very user-friendly and has many useful functions one of which is part-
1 While contemporary corpora do not assure contemporary data, for some of the downloaded material might have been web sites, documents, or books written long periods ago, the portion of such data is more likely to be significantly smaller than in more outdated corpora. 47 of-speech tagging. However, after testing this function, it was obvious that the word class classification is not flawless and in numerous cases of overlapping or less representative examples of word classes tends to classify token either rather randomly without considering its context or according to its prototypical word class considering its word form (fucking, for example, was classified almost exclusively as a verb).
Fortunately, this was not an issue in this particular case. Since this research did not deal with word class frequencies and context was required in both parts of the research for my own classification, it was necessary to go through each example separately anyway and any such miscategorisation was thus identified.
Research Design
I conducted quantitative research using corpus analysis. Its main aim was to analyse the semantic prosody of adjectives intensified by preceding adverbs damn to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that damn as an intensifier has more frequently a non- negative prosody. The analysed adjectives appeared in two possible environments:
1. damn as an intensifier of an adjective phrase ("She was damn happy!")
2. damn as an intensifier of a succeeding adjective as a modifier of a NP ("They are
damn irresponsible parents, you know.")
Since the main aim of this study was to observe the semantic prosody the intensifiers carry and not to compare how this prosody differs according to the morphological construction this modifier occurs in, this variable was left uncontrolled and unobserved.
Damn was observed in two English corpora, ETT and the BNC, because both of these corpora have drawbacks separately but when used together, they can be very useful.
ETT has enormous amounts of data for the analysis of damn, which BNC does not. On the other hand, the content of the BNC is well-balanced while ETT contains data from 48
'everywhere' but also possibly 'nowhere' since the data is not genre-categorized and there is no overview of how the content is divided. Furthermore, the BNC is, as opposed to
ETT, rather outdated (20-50 years outdated). Using both corpora thus offers a sample large enough, which will be also fairly balanced, up-to-date, and give the opportunity to make a comparison between usage 'before' and 'nowadays'.
The aim was to look for instances of damn in the two aforementioned corpora, observe and judge the semantic prosody of the phrase based on the intensified adjective as well as context and, using the analysed data, provide and contrast the results based on which a conclusion can be made about the semantic prosody of damn itself, make a historical comparison, and thus possibly reverse or at least attenuate the negative light that this popular swear word is traditionally portrayed in.
Two aspects were the primary focus of the analysis. The collocated adjectives to immediate right and the surrounding context (approximately 70 characters) 1 .
Furthermore, items to immediate left from the adverb were also observed in case of premodifying intensifiers such as so, too, etc. Since damn can be preceded by another intensifier, which is not a very common attribute, I was interested in how often, if at all, multiple premodification occurs with damn, how it is realised, and what the relationship between the intensifiers is.
As Hunston (2007) stated, overall context is crucial in indicating the semantic prosody, and therefore the surrounding context and not just immediately co-occurring items were analysed. A broad analysis was also important because implicit negativity in irony or seemingly positive adjectives could have come into play.
1 In many cases context of such size was insufficient but extended one of approximately 70 words was available. 49
Since intensification is a favourite tool for the use of irony (Coromines i Calders,
2010), it was another occurrence to be carefully observed. See the following sentence:
"He's so damn smart we had to start spelling things." (doc318703)
While the semantic prosody of the adjective itself would be without hesitation rated as positive, the context proves the exact opposite as the author is only being ironic.
Judging co-occurring words according to their more probable semantic prosody can be also insufficient in correct evaluation. See the following example: "The water coming out of that hose was damn cold." The phrase damn cold water would be likely rated as having a negative prosody. Nevertheless, if we observe it in context,
"After the holmgang came the traditional hosing down of the fighters,
made more entertaining by the fact that the water coming out of that hose is damn
cold. It is also traditional that Lynda is the first to, as it were, get the hose. She
screams most entertainingly." (doc#6568775)
At least from the narrator’s point of view, the fact that the water was cold made the event more entertaining, memorable, and thus the phrase had in fact a non-negative or even positive prosody. Occurrences of cases where the intensified adjective implied a positive prosody but the overall prosody was negative (or vice versa) were fairly frequent, which was one of the reasons why each utterance was inspected separately and in context.
Similarly to Hampe (2005), I decided to use the parameter of negative – non- negative prosody. Non-negative prosody included instances of positive and neutral orientation.
3.5.1 Sampling
For intensifier damn in ETT, query type 'word form with part of speech' set to
'adverbs' was used for the search in Sketch Engine. Furthermore, for the context part of
50 speech filter with set range one token to the right with search for adjectives only was set to generate only those results with adjectives immediately succeeding the intensifier.
Alternatives of damn (damned, goddam, goddamn and their related forms) were excluded from the study. To include them in the study while keeping it balanced, an equal amount of hits for each possible phrase would have to be chosen and analysed, and since, while searching for any divergence in the preferences of the collocated adjectives in damn(ed) + adjective and goddam/goddamn/goddamned + adjective structures, no significant difference in tendencies was found, it was concluded there was no need for the inclusion of these alternating intensifiers. As for the BNC, several adjustments were made.
First, the contextual part of speech of tokens to immediate right was set to filter our not only adjectives but also adverbs for the following reasons. As mentioned earlier,
Sketch Engine is not a flawless judge of world classes. When adjectives only were filtered out, only 190 tokens were returned out of which I suspected other 30-40 results to be classified incorrectly, being mostly adverbs. Since it can be assumed that the imperfection would work the other way around just as well, in other words, that many adjectives would be wrongly classified as adverbs, the search was extended by adding adverbs to the filter in hope of finding more adjectives 'hiding' among adverbs.
Second, the part of speech of damn was not set to adverbs but to 'unspecified'.
Due to the smaller size of the BNC in contrast with ETT, I was trying to save every correctly categorised token and knowing that first, applying more restrictions to the search would possibly exclude some correct tokens and second, that damn + adverb/adjective is a structure in which damn would be most frequently categorised as an adverbial element anyway, I did not assign any part of speech condition to the intensifier.
51
Last, to make the search for correctly classified tokens a bit faster, another condition was set. Since damn near and damn well were very likely to constitute a large amount of hits to be removed afterwards, lemma filter for context was adjusted to exclude concordances with lemmas near and well if found immediately after the intensifier damn.
The featured results were observed in kwic concordance, context of each analysed hit consisting of approximately 70 characters. Applying the function 'shuffle', the order of all hits was randomized. Features observed were the following: intensified adjective, semantic prosody of the overall utterance (negative / non-negative), and possible premodifying adverbial booster immediately preceding the analysed intensifier.
52
4 HYPOTHESES
As described earlier, swear words are not inherently charged with negativity, they reflect different taboo level, are used with different frequency, and they do not necessarily reflect or signify solely what would be referred to as a negative prosody.
Furthermore, language and the meaning of words changes over time and this change is particularly striking with swear words where specific items can lose or increase their level of offensiveness over a very short period of time. Damn as a very frequently used and mild swear word is a great example of this flexibility, both semantic and temporal. I would, therefore, like to propose the following hypotheses.
First, when used as an adverbial booster, damn, which is as a swear word generally perceived as negatively charged, has a NON-NEGATIVE semantic prosody.
And second, that the semantic prosody of adverbial booster damn in the last quarter of the previous century, while still predominantly non-negative, shows in contrast with its more recent usage increase in cases of negative semantic prosody.
The second hypothesis is based on the fact that damn started as severely profane and with time gradually lost its intensity to such an extent that it began to be used in a non-negative environment. Even though quarter of a century is not a significant period of time, the semantic changes, as well as morphosyntactic, have been vast, hectic, and recent. The next chapter introduces and discusses the results.
53
5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
ETT returned 84,009 tokens with frequency 3,70 per million. A sample of 470 tokens was chosen for analysis 1 . Having included all the filters mentioned in the methodology, the BNC returned 312 tokens with frequency 2,78 per million. After removing incorrectly categorized items and items with insufficient/incomprehensible context, 381 hits were left for analysis in ETT and 209 hits in the BNC. The removed items were mostly adverbs (…she was trying so damn hard…ECM), idiomatic phrases
(…Nigel Planer speaks at last, though he has damn all to say…A8S), nouns (…not much slips past the damn Chinese when it comes to jigger jig...HTU), or functioned as premodifying negative adjectives (…how concerned I was about this damn phantom baby...HGT). The following table shows the final number of tokens for analysis.
Table 2 - ETT and the BNC sample data in numbers
ETT BNC
Amount of analysed tokens 470 312
Amount of removed tokens 89 103
Final amount of tokens per corpus 381 209
Final amount of tokens in total 590
As the table shows, 590 tokens in total were analysed (75% of the original amount). In the BNC majority of removed items were an incorrectly categorised part of speech while in ETT a significant portion of the removed material (not higher than
1 The desired number of analysed tokens was about 400 but I expected tens of the returned tokens to be miscategorised and therefore chose a larger sample. 54 miscategorisation though) contained unintelligible text. We shall first look at the results from each corpus separately.
Damn in ETT
The results for semantic prosody of the intensifier damn in ETT undoubtedly prove the first hypothesis and show that the non-negative prosody is prevailing in intensifying damn. Out of 381 analysed tokens, 264 (69%) were judged as non-negative with the remaining 117 tokens (31%) judged as negative. The most frequent adjective with positive prosody was good (90 tokens). From negative prosody it was most frequently reoccurring expensive (8 tokens). Below is the full list of analysed adjectives with their frequency in parentheses.
Adjectives with negative prosody:
expensive (8); hard (7); tired (5); lazy (4); busy, sick, cold (3); creepy, miserable, obvious, perfect, proud, scary, short, stupid, tough (2); angry, anxious, awful, beautiful, big, black, boring, bright, crazy, curious, depressing, distracting, disturbing, early, easy, full, funny, generic, good, heavy, high, horny, hot, hungry, cheap, chilly, ignorant, immature, important, inconsistent, intense, long, loud, mad, many, needy, noisy, obscure, off-putting, old, original, painful, picky, pissy, polite, predictable, pricey, proper, pure, rare, realistic, savage, selfish, sexy, shy, silly, spiffy, stellar, strong, stubborn, tacky, threatening, right, tiny, ugliest, wicked, wrong (1)
Adjectives with non-negative prosody:
good (90); hot (12); cool, sure, sexy (10); fine (8); funny, awesome (7); cute, tasty
(6); lucky (5); beautiful, nice (4); glad, proud, sweet (3); close, catchy, easy, excellent,
55 fast, happy, hard, impressive, interesting, right, strong (2); adorable, amenable, attractive, clear, cold, comfortable, common, compelling, confident, delicious, different, dreamy, enjoyable, exciting, familiar, fantastic, fat, few, fluid, frightening, good-looking, handsome, handy, healthy, helpful, high, hip, horny, huge, humorous, hungry, cheap, incredible, infectious, intense, long, mean, naked, naughty, phenomenal, photogenic, popular, productive, profitable, rare, ready, silly, smart, solid, stable, stylish, tired, useful, wise (1).
Speaking of the evaluation, majority of results were not very difficult to categorise. On the other hand, it was surprising that in most cases the basic kwic concordance of 70 characters was not enough for a confident evaluation and the extended context was necessary. Many times this context was crucial as the case of seemingly negative/positive adjective occurred surprisingly often. Comparing an adjective in isolation and in context can show some striking differences in meaning. Some examples of such contrast are below:
A. I have so much stuff to get done that I don't know where to start. And when I
finally do some triage and settle on one task to accomplish, I can't think
straight because my head is too damn full of To Do List. (doc#1851665)
B. I haven't tried Socks that Rock because I am too damn cheap to get a credit
card. Also, banks don't like giving you credit when you are a stay at home
mommy with no credit rating. (doc#3966142)
C. That was the problem. He couldn't talk to Fraser like he did to other people,
because Fraser wasn't like other people. Fraser was so damn pure that it
made Ray feel like a shit just to want him, to want Fraser to call him his best
friend. (doc#20810701)
56
D. You're just and so god damn perfect I will not stand it . If only I saw it met you
earlier... if only. (doc#5281045)
E. In a way, the message about innovation that is too often lost is this: Stop trying
to be so damn original. Innovation is as much about prospecting for oldies but
goodies as it is about invention. Look at it this way: if it is good enough for
Jimi and Jonathan, then it is certainly okay for you and me. (doc#29864735)
F. Coming here had been a mistake. Hanging out with people who used to be his
friends only reminded him that he didn't fit in anymore and seeing Megan
again had been the worst of it. Did she have to be so damn beautiful?
(doc#9524823)
G. Lucy Spraggan had won over judges Tulisa, Mel B, Gary Barlow and Lou Lou
with her comic track, that is so damn infectious I literally can't stop singing
it. (doc#29507088)
H. It is about a girl he met at a bar and he was brave enough to approach. "And
all night I tried to look out at that crowd and find her, but those lights are so
damn bright up there. So I said, 'We've got time for one more song. You all
know it, so sing along. Gonna send it out to a girl. I hope she's still here."
(doc#11573606)
All examples above except for G represent words with expected positive semantic prosody, which are in this particular context negative. G, on the other hand, suggests a non-negative one1. The highlighted words in the surrounding text are hints pointing out the more likely semantic prosody the analysed text has.
1 The most common collocations in infectious + noun structure according to both ETT and the BNC are lemmata disease and agent. 57
Another phenomenon to appear in the results, which was discussed in methodology, was irony. Several such cases also occurred.
I. Very well said, especially with the comment on Sylvester. He isn't even on a
friggen' football team right now, yet we have a fan suggesting the coaching
staff should be 'shredded' for releasing him. Yep, Sylvester was so damn good
that 31 other football teams have ignored his ass. Does the average Steeler fan
even know what the hell he is talking about? My guess is...not really.
(doc#36493881)
J. If you like your game fast and flashy but also tough and rough, the EPL is for
you. The EPL features a range of clubs from the eternally rich and dominant
to perennial working class underdogs ("and damn proud of it, mate! "
*punches you in the face* kidding! not really).(doc#29138723)
The second example is not a traditional case of irony, yet since the second statement nullifies the seriousness of the first one, it thus also challenges its prosody, creating the feeling of dissatisfaction, even embarrassment, which was therefore rated as having a negative prosody.
Damn in the BNC
Similarly to ETT, the analysis from the BNC also shows a prevailing amount of non-negative semantic prosody. The ratio between negative and non-negative is 33% (67 tokens) to 67% (142 tokens). While the total numbers prove the first proposed hypothesis to be right, the deviation between the recent and the less recent corpus is so negligible
(2%) that it can be stated that the second hypothesis proved wrong and that the semantic expansion of damn to contexts with non-negative prosody had been already complete at least by the beginning of the last quarter of the previous century. It is also important to
58 note that 93% of the available tokens were published 1985-1993, the most recent time period available in the BNC. Therefore, almost all of the studied data was approximately
20-28 years older than that from ETT. The overview of the publication dates of the analysed data can be seen in the table below.
Table 3 - BNC data according to date
Publication date Analysed data
1985-1993 93% (195 tokens)
1975-1984 5% (10 tokens)
1960-1974 2% (4 tokens)
The rest of the data coming from the period 1960-1984 showed consistency with the remaining data with ratio 36% negative prosody and 64% non-negative one.
Nonetheless, even if the results showed a greater divergence, considering that these 14 tokens account for 7% of the analysed data, no importance could be assigned to the numbers anyway.
Speaking of the frequency, the most frequent adjective with a positive prosody was good (71); from adjectives with an overall negative prosody it was silly (8). Below is the complete list of adjectives according to their frequency of occurrence.
Adjectives with negative prosody
silly (8); stupid (7); cold (5); boring, poor (3); difficult, great, rude, tired, patronizing (2); awkward, big, cool, crying, dangerous, different, dry, fat, hard, full, hot, impertinent, late, miserable, noisy, old, same, sad, selfish, serious, shrunken, sickening, sickly, skinny, smart, sorry, spiteful, terrifying, tricky, ugly, uneducated (1)
59
Adjectives with non-negative prosody
good (71); sure (14); right (10); lucky (7); fine, great (5); big (3); clean, funny, nice, powerful (2); brilliant, clever, cold, desirable, dishy, easy, fast, heavy, hopeful, impenetrable, nonchalant, peculiar, positive, proud, radical, rare, straightforward, ticklish, weird (1)
Similarly to the analysis of the results in ETT, some of the less clear adjectives and their examples shall be portrayed (with supporting pieces of context in bold) and briefly commented on now.
From the negative prosody, great (K) refers to something unnecessarily large, cool to a personal trait synonymous to 'cold' (L), smart is ironic (M), hot (N) defines extreme weather conditions, serious as in 'not relaxed enough' (O). Ticklish (P) refers to a strong drink (which is not a bad quality if it is whiskey) and radical (Q) to an action in order to help.
K. 'My God, woman, you were the one who said we needed more space.'
'I said we needed a playroom for the kids and a bit more garden - not a damn
great manse at the arse-end of the Northern line with its own private
wilderness...' (F9C)
L. 'But that's not my definition of the quality of love. Shit, I'm trying to talk myself
out of it, it's just when I see her...
She resented Dionne being so damn cool and objective . (A0L)
M. (The speaker is criticising herself for losing a picture) Oh, well. I've lost it,
thought Jay. Congratulations, bitch, what else is new? Thought you were so
damn smart getting it in the first place, and drink has blurred you so much
you've blown it. (A0L)
60
N. 'I have to rest in the afternoons.' Jean-Paul's voice was defiant. 'It's the climate
here. It's so damn hot. I'll be able to think more clearly this evening. When
it's cooler... ' (C8S)
O. Only he and Mallachy knew about it, and sometimes he regretted that he'd told
his friend. Mallachy could be too damn serious for fun. (HTS)
P. This is Major Gibbs,' he told them.
'Have a drink,' Dangerfield offered.
'It's damn ticklish, really,' the major said. He accepted some whisky. (HRA)
Q. A comp is held by popular demand, but although there was a good turnout by
competitors and supporters, it seemed as if the old Farnborough magic had
gone forever despite some damn radical action from Jeff Hedges. (ARM)
It is unarguable that context is vital to the correct evaluation of words and their prosody. The following section shall observe cases of multiple premodification, their frequency, and some ambiguities surrounding particular modifiers.
Multiple premodification
Since damn is one of a few adverbial boosters which allow other intensifying element to modify it, one of the observed features apart from semantic prosody was premodification preceding and to different levels intensifying the whole phrase.
Elements immediately preceding damn in damn + adjective structure were analysed for possible presence of any other intensifier. It was surprising to see that a considerable portion of results consisted of additional premodifying element.
210 hits (55%) in ETT were premodified by some element. In the BNC, it was 39 hits (19%). Combining results from both corpora, 42% hits included some kind of modification immediately preceding damn. That means that to see adverb + damn +
61 adjective is 'almost' as common as to see only damn + adjective. It is important to note here that the premodifying intensifier is not necessarily modifying the succeeding damn.
Let us investigate the following example:
R. The idea behind these types of questions, is that a person's past behaviour is
usually a pretty damn good predictor of their future actions. (doc#67980)
The sentence R contains a NP with multiple premodification. The question is what modifies what. It might be assumed that it is a gradual modification where each element is modified by a preceding one (i.e. pretty modifies damn, damn modifies good, good modifies predicator, etc. ). Nevertheless, as obvious from the examples below, each modifier can function separately while staying grammatical:
S. …a person's past behaviour is usually a damn good predictor of their future
actions.
T. …a person's past behaviour is usually a pretty good predictor of their future
actions.
U. …a person's past behaviour is usually a good predictor of their future actions.
The fact that the sentences S, T, U are grammatically correct suggests that the modification is not of subordinating kind and both intensifying adverbs hence stand in coordination with one another.
Speaking of the adverbs realising the first modifier, pretty, so, and too were most frequent in both corpora. The frequency of occurrence of all modifiers in both corpora is portrayed in the table below.
62
Table 4 - Multiple premodification
ETT BNC
Pretty 92 11
So 85 16
Too 25 9
Rotten 0 2
Plain 0 1
Really 3 0
This 2 0
That 2 0
Fairly 1 0
Rotten was present in two cases (V, W) from the same publication and both modifying patronizing.
V. 'You're just saying that to shut me up. You can be so rotten damn patronizing.'
'Have you got a handkerchief?'
W. 'No. And if I had I wouldn't lend it to anyone as rotten damn patronizing, stupid
and heartless as you. #HRA
Having found only 3 instances of the phrase 'rotten damn' in ETT, one with damn functioning as a noun (…the ball worth three tenths of a rotten damn, doc#2047594), it can be safely concluded that rotten is probably an adoption from fixed phrases such as worth/care/give a tuppeny/twopenny/cold/hot damn.
Fairly (X) was the only attenuating adverbial modifier.
63
X. I'm at a bit of a low point myself, having just spent almost all of the last 3 days
either in bed or on the toilet! Now, I'm feeling better and fairly damn hungry.
doc#10758628
Appearance of an attenuating and emphasizing element in immediate succession is extremely uncommon and sounds almost ungrammatical as one in fact negates the effect of the other.
Pretty is also slightly ambiguous. While OLD recognizes adverbial pretty as synonymous to either fairly, to some extent ("I’m pretty sure I’ll be going") or very ("The performance was pretty impressive")1, neither CLD nor MWUD lists the second meaning from OLD, and thus categorizing pretty as a downtoner. Quirk et al. (1985) too present pretty together with rather and fairly as downtoners, pretty being "the most informal and strongest of the three" (p. 446). Since it was just stated that attenuating and emphasizing elements do not usually stand along as their functions stand almost in an opposition and moreover, since damn was in all other cases (except for the one with fairly) preceded by an emphasizer adding intensity, it seems that when collocated with damn, pretty shifts its function from downtoner to emphasizer. The only other explanation is that the presence of pretty is used to slightly decrease the intensity of emphasizing damn. This does not seem to be a likely option though considering that there is ample number of emphasizing and amplifying adverbs with subtle differences in intensity to choose from.
1 The examples of each use in the OED are not very clear though. Another example for 'attenuating' pretty is "The game was pretty damn good.", for 'emphasizing' pretty it is "Things are looking pretty good!". Personally, I do not see any difference between the two sentences other than the second sentence ending with an exclamation mark. The only feature, which could thus theoretically distinguish the kind of intensification intended, is intonation. 64
Corpora combined
As mentioned earlier, the two corpora contributed with two features. Balanced data and large sample. Having combined the results from both ETT and the BNC, the following table shows the overall results of this research.
Table 5 - Overall results from both corpora
Number of tokens Percentage
(590 total)
Negative prosody 184 31%
Non-negative prosody 406 69%
Most frequent adjective(s) with 18 10% out of all negative
negative semantic prosody tokens
SILLY, STUPID
Most frequent adjectives with 161 40% out of all non-negative
non-negative semantic prosody tokens
GOOD
Multiple intensification 249 42%
Most frequently intensifying 103 42% out of all tokens with
adverb PRETTY multiple intensification
65
6 NOTES ON FURTHER RESEARCH AND SOME
IMPROVEMENTS
What is presented here is just a very short study. Nonetheless, there are several notes which could improve further research.
ETT did indeed provide ample amount of examples for a good sample.
Unfortunately, it is visible from the results how unbalanced the corpus itself is. The fact that the most frequently occurring adjectives are good, hot, sexy suggests that damn often collocates with evaluation of physical features, notions of (predominantly) female body and the erotica, and occasional pornography. This would be a valid proposition if ETT included information about sources, genres, and the ratio of their representation in the corpus. Since what gets to become part of the data of a web-crawled corpus is almost completely uncontrolled, such proposition can’t not only be backed up by the analysed data but it can also provide misleading results. While even if all the 'physical' adjectives were removed, the results would still show positive prosody for the prevalence was significant, if the aim of the research was to comment on adjectives most frequently co- occurring with damn, the results would not be reliable for the sample might as well be from 99% of pornographic genre or any other homogeneous material. Still, as pointed out several times throughout this work, there are many advantages to a web-crawled corpus. Having a sample of only a few tokens for analysis available from a balanced corpus is not much more reliable than having too many from an unbalanced one.
Furthermore, it would be very useful to compare the semantic prosody of other intensifiers such as bloody or fucking. Damn has one feature which the rest is lacking and that is its religious root. Since the taboo level of damn has become weaker just like the power of religion on people, the non-negative semantic prosody might be largely the consequence of this connection. Nevertheless, since other intensifiers, such as those
66 aforementioned, have no such etymological background, the study of their semantic prosody might confirm or dispute any relevance of the relation between weakened origins of damn and its weakened taboo level.
The application of pretty as a shady attenuating element brings an idea for qualitative research. Whether pretty increases or decreases the succeeding element, whether adverb or adjective, could be investigated by conducting a survey. Participants would observe pretty along with other downtoners and emphasizers in various environments and on scale (e.g. one to five, five being the most intense, or using Likert scale with range not at all-a little bit-fairly-really-extremely/completely, etc.) judge the intensity of the whole statement. Such a survey could confirm that the meaning of pretty is not fixed and the level of its intensity depends on environment in which it is used.
67
7 CONCLUSION
This work concentrated on swearing with special focus on the word damn. Even though it may seem that the motivation behind the choice of this topic was an authorised use of obscene language in an academic environment (and this privilege was certainly appreciated), it hopefully proved that swearing is more than just a bad language and that it is worth studying as it is full of grammatically unique patterns, inconsistency, morphological flexibility, and semantic ambiguity.
In the theoretical part the initial interest was a more general one in order to introduce the phenomenon of foul language while stressing its importance for it is a part of our everyday language with non-negligible frequency of use. As shown subsequently, foul language is not a confusing mixture of the bad and the worse but has its own structuring. The section portraying swearing typology showed that foul language has uniform functions which can be realised by larger or smaller portion of swear words based predominantly on their grammatical flexibility and semantic aspects. Speaking of grammatical flexibility and the word damn, this work tried to portray the range of possible application of damn which extends up to five word classes. Such a variability is extremely rare and uncommon, just like the rules which seem to govern the use of damn in different morphosyntactic structures, making damn appear to be a sui generis class.
Using wider definition and criteria for word class membership as defined mostly by
Quirk et al. (1985), each word class which damn can possibly represent was reviewed.
The observation suggests that damn is located in most cases on the periphery of a world class rather than being an obvious member. Adverbial and interjectional damn appear to be the least ambiguous in terms of world class membership, verbal, adjectival, and nominal the most. It is obvious that damn in many environments never fully complies with language rules and expectations and that grammaticality gains a completely new
68 meaning when combined with swear words. Some of the morphological aspects of damn
(and swear words in general) are so out of the ordinary and so lax to general grammatical norms usually applicable to their assumed word class that it can be concluded that trying to precisely establish word class membership and the rules governing damn as a swear word is a pre-lost battle and that it is safer and less questionable to observe their behaviour in various linguistic environments and assume which part of speech they have the most in common with rather than define them as belonging to that category for it seems that swear words are simply a category to itself.
In the practical part, the notion of semantic prosody and its determination were briefly introduced and placed in the context of adverbial booster damn. The pros and cons of web-crawled corpora such as ETT in contrast with the BNC were discussed and it was concluded their combination would be the most profitable. The drawbacks, as well as the user-friendly design of the corpus tool Sketch Engine, were also reviewed. Corpus research studying the semantic prosody in damn + adjective structure followed with results confirming the first hypothesis, i.e. that the adverbial booster damn in the aforementioned structure has predominantly non-negative prosody in ratio 69:31. The other hypothesis claiming that sample with less recent data will provide, in contrast with a very recent one, less examples with non-negative prosody was disproved as the ratio differed by only 2%. Furthermore, multiple premodification turned out to be present in almost every other example.
Observing dictionaries, ideas of different linguists, etymological background, semantic properties, and adding my own remarks, I tried to at least partially explain why damn functions the way it does and why its patterns are so incoherent. While the mission to completely uncover the mysteries behind this word was not very successful, some of the patterns of use were explained. It can be concluded that damn is a very complex,
69 multifunctional word, one of the most frequently used members of foul language with mild intensity and wide range of possible use both morphologically and semantically.
Having observed damn in and out, it seems that swear words and this word in particular often show their imaginary middle finger to basic grammatical rules which makes one even more curious.
70
List of abbreviations used
BNC British National Corpus
COCA Corpus of Contemporary American English
CLD Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary
ETT Corpus enTenTen2013
MWUD Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary
NP nominal phrase
OLD Oxford Learner’s Dictionary
71
List of figures and tables
Table 1 Ljung’s typology of swearing
Table 2 ETT and the BNC sample data in numbers
Table 3 BNC data according to date
Table 4 Multiple premodification
Table 5 Overall results from both corpora
72
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Abstract
This study looks into foul language and swear words as a group with irregular idiosyncratic features which remain, most likely due to their 'sensitive nature', to a large extent undiscovered. This fact led me to observe and study one of the most diverse and representative swear words damn (with a frequent contrast with other swear words) as a phenomenon reoccurring in morphologically and syntactically uncommon structures with attempt to categorise damn and discover patterns to help understand its nature. The linguistic analysis portrays the ability of damn to function as up to five different parts of speech but also shows that a perfect classification is not possible for damn appears in almost all cases 'on the periphery'. A following corpus-study investigates the prevailing semantic prosody in structures with adverbial damn premodifying adjectives. The results show significant predominance of non-negative prosodies and thus oppose the traditional view of damn and swear words in general adding a negative emphasis to a clause. No difference was present in the results of two corpora of time-contrasting data.
Furthermore, cases of multiple premodification with another adverbial element preceding damn and co-intensifying the following adjective were also surprisingly frequent. I conclude that the reputation of damn (and to an extent of swear words in general) needs to be reconsidered as its semantic functions are nowhere near as negative as they used to be.
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Resumé
Tato studie se zabývá vulgárním jazykem a sprostými slovy jakožto skupinou s nepravidelnými, jedinečnými vlastnostmi, které, nejspíše z důvodu jejich citlivé povahy, zůstávají z velké části neobjeveny. Tento fakt mě přivedl k zájmu prozkoumat jedno z nejrůznorodějších a nejreprezentativnějších sprostých slov, a to ke slovu sakra (damn)
(často v kontrastu s jinými sprostými slovy), které představuje fenomén objevující se v morfologicky a syntakticky neobvyklých konstrukcích, a zároveň se pokusím kategorizovat a objevit vzorce, které by pomohly pochopit jeho charakter. Lingvistická analýza ukazuje schopnost slova sakra vykonávat funkci až pěti slovních druhů, ale také to, že úplná klasifikace není možná proto, že slovo sakra se téměř ve všech případech vyskytuje na okraji daného slovního druhu. Následující korpusová analýza zkoumá převažující sémantickou prozodii v konstrukci, kde příslovce sakra premodifikuje přídavná jména. Výsledky prokazují jasnou převahu prozodie, která není negativní, a tudíž popírají tradiční názor, že sakra a sprostá slova obecně přidávají větám negativní důraz. Výsledky dvou korpusů s odlišným stářím dat neprokázaly žádný rozdíl.
Vícečetná premodifikace, ve které další příslovce předchází sakra a spolu s ním zdůrazňuje následující přídavné jmené, byla překvapivě častá. Závěrem navrhuji, že reputace slova sakra (a do určité míry i sprostých slov obecně) musí být přehodnocena, jelikož sémantické funkce tohoto slova už dnes nejsou zdaleka tak negaitvní jako bývaly.
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