"OH MY GOD! Did you 'focking' see that?": A Longitudinal Study of Intensifying Fucking in the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Series
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35903/teanga.v13i.10851Keywords:
Corpus Stylistics, (Fictionalized) Irish English, Irish English Variational Pragmatics, Taboo Language, Intensifying FuckingAbstract
This paper contributes to the fields of Irish English (IrE) Variational Pragmatics and to expanding the research on (IrE) taboo language by conducting a detailed analysis of the use, colligational pattern preference, pragmatic multifunctionality, emotional conveyance, and speaker identity indexicality value of Intensifying Fucking (InF) in a corpus of three Ross O’Carroll-Kelly novels which span a period of 16 years (i.e. 2006-2022). Using quantitative and qualitative Corpus Stylistics methods, the paper not only retrieves findings that align with the literature (e.g. prominence of use among young(er) male speakers and transmission of negative emotions and anger, in particular), but also appears to document developments that may have taken place in the span of time covered by the corpus. These include the potential gender-neutrality of this intensifier which surges and increases among (young(er)) female speakers by 2022, as well as a seeming shift in colligational pattern preference from InF+Noun Phrase to InF+Verbal Phrase, with the appearance of new patterns including Standard and Non-Standard Tmesis by the last book. Pragmatic developments also seem to be recorded documented in the corpus, with an expansion of the positive emotional repertoire and with the acquisition of a wide variety of negative emotions, most of which are only present in the 2022 book.
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