A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Swear Words in Friends Series
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol57.Iss2.4118Keywords:
swearing, Friends, gender, mild swearing, strong swearingAbstract
The present study focuses on the use of swearing words in the Friends sitcom. It is a qualitative and quantitative analysis. The aim of this study is to investigate the types of swearing words used in the American society through analyzing one of the most popular TV. Series, the Friends, in the United States and different parts of the world
Two models are adopted in this study. Andersson and Hirsch’s (1985) model which classifies swearing words into their syntactic and morphological patterns; Tony’s (2006) model which classifies swearing words according to their positive or negative connotations. The data consist of ten seasons, each season consists of fifteen episodes. The data has been downloaded as PDF from the Internet, and an automatic research has done for every word in the sitcom.
The conclusions arrived at are that women do swearing more than men, the characters in the sitcom use different types of swearing words, the swearing words vary according to their syntactic and morphological patterns, and that mild and very mild swearing words are used most by the characters of the sitcom.
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