Tark, shperlack, burfip, and other alien bad words : exploring a sound-meaning association in swear words of English and French

Robin Vallery Abstract : Tark, shperlack, burfip, and other alien bad words : exploring a sound-meaning association in swear words of English and French Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants (i.e. plosives, voiceless fricatives, and affricates), compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism or systematicity, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning.           I will describe the methodology and first results of an experimental study I am conducting in order to investigate this hypothesis: I ask native speakers of English and French to spontaneously invent fictional alien words. I will examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved and then discuss some theoretical insights on the different types of sound-meaning associations (systematicity, sound symbolism, and iconicity).           I will briefly mention two possible explanations in terms of iconicity, based on insights from existing literature: plosives may be associated with “violation of hearer’s space”, or unsonorous consonants may be associated with “aggression”.           Swear words have an emotional, contextual meaning, like interjections, so this unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve an emotional-contextual, non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected ways. References : Bergen, B. K. 2004. “The psychological reality of phonaesthemes” Language 80(2). 290–311. doi.org/10.1353/lan.2004.0056 Bergen, B. K., 2016. What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. New York: Basic Books. Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., Monaghan, P., “Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19(10). 603–615 Finkelstein, S. R., 2018. "Swearing as emotion acts", in Pizarro Pedraza, A., (ed.) Linguistic Taboo Revisited: Novel Insights from Cognitive Perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Greenberg, J., 1987. Languages in the Americas. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Haiman, J., 2018. Ideophones and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rouayrenc, Catherine. 1996. Les gros mots. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sidhu, D. M., 2019. “Explorations of Sound Symbolism and Iconicity” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. [Accesssed April 9, 2022] Available at: hdl.handle.net/1880/111016 Vallery, R., 2019. “The sound of taboo: exploring phonopragmatic associations of swear words in English and French” Unpublished MA dissertation, Université de Lille, France Vallery, R., Lemmens, M., 2021. “The sound of taboo: exploring a sound-meaning association in swear words of English and French” Pragmatics and Cognition, vol.28, no.1, pp.87-137. Available at: doi.org/10.1075/pc.20021.val Wharton, T., 2003 “Interjections, language, and the ‘showing/saying’ continuum” Pragmatics and Cognition, vol.11, no.1,pp.39-91 Yardy, B. J., 2010. “Sound symbolism, sonority, and swearing: an affect induction perspective”, PhD thesis, University of Lethbridge, Canada. [Accessed June 4, 2019] Available at: opus.uleth.ca/handle/10133/2556 Bio note : Robin Vallery is a PhD student in linguistics at the Université de Lille (France) who works on taboo, swear words, systematicity, sound symbolism, and iconicity, under the supervision of Maarten Lemmens and Paolo Mairano. He obtained his MA at the Université de Lille (2019).