Beyond Philology No.

20/1, 2023
ISSN 1732-1220, eISSN 2451-1498

https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2023.1.01

The use of taboo language in quarrels:

The difference between men and women:
A cross-cultural perspective

JELENA KIREJEVA

Received 30.08.2023,
accepted 3.11.2023.

Abstract

The present study falls within the realms of sociocultural linguistics

and pragmatics. It focuses on the exploration of the intersection of
taboo language, culture and the social index of gender in contempo-
rary British and Russian drama. Thirty conflict episodes comprise the
materials for the present study. The investigation aims at (1) estab-
lishing the taboo repertoire (both semantic and functional) employed
by men and women having a row in the context of the aforementioned
cultures; (2) establishing the correlation between the employment of
taboo language and the observation of the politeness constraint.
On the basis of the analysis carried out in the study the following
conclusions can be drawn: (1) despite different cultural contexts, the
personages demonstrate similar semantic and functional patterns; i.e.
the personages (both men and women) involved in conflicts, or quar-
rels, employ a similar repertoire of taboo items; (2) a wide spectrum of
negative emotions experienced by the personages in the quarrels is
rendered through the extensive use of taboo language, whose function
is non-interactive, i.e. intended to mirror the speaker’s emotional in-
volvement; (3) it can be claimed that face as the most valuable personal
10 Beyond Philology 20/1

possession is devalorized in both cultures under analysis, politeness

as a constraint ensuring communicative concord and comity is not
observed.

Keywords

drama, quarrels, taboo language, the social index of gender, cultures

Używanie języka tabu w kłótniach:

różnice między mężczyznami i kobietami.
Perspektywa międzykulturowa

Abstrakt

Niniejsze badanie mieści się w obszarze językoznawstwa socjokulturo-

wego i pragmatyki. Koncentruje się na badaniu przecięcia się języka tabu,
kultury i społecznego wskaźnika płci we współczesnym dramacie brytyj-
skim i rosyjskim. Materiał do niniejszego badania stanowi trzydzieści epi-
zodów konfliktu. Badanie ma na celu (1) ustalenie repertuaru tabu (za-
równo semantycznego, jak i funkcjonalnego) stosowanego przez mężczyzn
i kobiety kłócących się w kontekście wyżej wymienionych kultur; (2) usta-
lenie korelacji między stosowaniem języka tabu a przestrzeganiem ogra-
niczenia grzeczności.
Na podstawie przeprowadzonej analizy można wyciągnąć następujące
wnioski: (1) pomimo odmiennych kontekstów kulturowych, osoby wyka-
zują podobne wzorce semantyczne i funkcjonalne, tj. osoby (zarówno ko-
biety, jak i mężczyźni) zaangażowane w konflikty, czyli kłótnie, posługują
się podobnym repertuarem pozycji tabu; (2) szerokie spektrum negatyw-
nych emocji doświadczanych przez osoby w kłótniach jest oddawane po-
przez szerokie użycie języka tabu, którego funkcja jest nieinteraktywna,
tj. ma odzwierciedlać osobę mówiącą; (3) można stwierdzić, że w obu ana-
lizowanych kulturach twarz jako najcenniejsza własność osobista jest de-
waloryzowana, a grzeczność jako ograniczenie zapewniające komunika-
cyjną zgodność i komitywę nie jest przestrzegana.
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 11

Słowa kluczowe

dramat, kłótnie, język tabu, społeczny indeks płci, kultury

1. Introduction

Having in mind the fact that Otto Jespersen’s work “The

Woman” saw the light of day in 1922, it can be claimed that
research on language and gender has been carried out for at
least a century. What is more, the issue has been a source of
perennial inspiration for linguists for all these years.
Before the appearance of Robin Lakoff’s booklet Language
and Woman’s Place in 1975 academic research was dominated
by white, well-educated males, whose androcentrism sprang
from a sense that men and people were the same thing (this is
sometimes called men-as-norm approach). In her research
Lakoff (1975) made the subject of linguistic sexism visible and
argued that gender differences in language were directly related
to the relative social power of male speakers and relative pow-
erlessness of female speakers. The approach advocated by
Lakoff is labelled the deficit approach and it claims to establish
something called “women’s language”. It is definitely Robin
Lakoff’s investigation that marked a turning point in sociolin-
guistics and sparked off a spate of further language and gender
research. Prolific research in the sphere revealed certain facts
concerning the peculiarities of “women’s language”. Thus,
women tend to use more standard forms, that is, more overtly
prestigious forms (Holmes 2001: 154–159; Trudgill 1974: 94–
95). It is noteworthy that the study into linguistic behaviour in
the three largest cities of Lithuania yielded similar results, that
is, the number of men that do not have a command of the Lith-
uanian language being the state language of Lithuania is
slightly bigger than that of women (Ramonienė 2010: 281).
Women are reported to be more status-conscious. Standard or
prestige forms represent linguistic capital which people can use
12 Beyond Philology 20/1

to increase their value or marketability, whereas vernacular

forms preferred by men are associated with masculinity, tough-
ness, coolness and authority (Holmes and Wilson 2017: 174–
175). According to Lakoff (1975: 55), women are

supposed to speak more politely than men. This is related to their

hypercorrectness in grammar, of course, since it is considered more
mannerly in middle-class society to speak ‘properly’, but it goes
deeper: Women are the experts at euphemism: more positively,
women are the repositories of tact and know the right things to say
to other people […]. Women are supposed to be particularly careful
to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and to uphold the other social con-
ventions.

However reasonable the author’s observations are, it should be

pointed out, that they may seem lacking grounds and basis
since the concept of politeness was not clearly defined at that
time, and the seminal works in the sphere of pragmatic polite-
ness appeared later.
As the deficit approach is now seen as outdated by research-
ers, the social constructionist approach is now the prevailing
paradigm. Within the realms of the approach, gender identity is
seen as a social construct rather than as a “given” social cate-
gory identical with biological sex. As West and Zimmerman
(1987: 4) eloquently put it, speakers should be seen as “doing
gender” rather than statically “being a particular gender”. The
linguists’ idea was that gender should be understood as the
product of social doings, more specifically “as a routine, meth-
odological, and recurring accomplishment” rather than a set of
traits or a role.
The present study adopts the social constructionist approach
and falls within the realms of interactional sociolinguistics, so-
ciocultural linguistics and pragmatics.
It tends to explore taboo language through the prism of gen-
der differences (within and across Anglo-Saxon and Russian
cultures) and politeness being both social and cultural cons-
traint exerting influence on speech practices. The investigation
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 13

focuses on the exploration of the intersection of language (taboo

language), culture and the social index of gender. It aims at 1)
establishing the taboo repertoire (both semantic and functional)
employed by men and women having a row in the context of the
aforementioned cultures; 2) establishing the correlation be-
tween the employment of taboo language and the observation of
the politeness constraint.

2. Materials and methodology

Thirty conflict episodes, or quarrels (the longest episode con-

tains 79 lines, the shortest episode contains 5 lines) identified
in contemporary British and Russian drama (i.e. plays written
by the representatives of In-Yer-Face theatre Philip Ridley and
David Eldridge and plays written by the representatives of новая
драма [new drama]1 Ivan Vyrypayev, the Presniakov Brothers
and Aleksey Zhitkovskiy) comprise the sampling for the present
study. Contemporary drama (written during two first decades of
the 21st century) has been chosen as the materials for the study
due to the following reasons: first, it always “forces us to look at
ideas and feelings we would normally avoid because they are too
painful, too frightening, too unpleasant or too acute” (Sierz
2000: 6); second, drama being a secondary speech genre, which
in the process of its formation “absorbs and digest various pri-
mary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated
speech communion” (Bakhtin 1986: 62), is the only literary
genre which successfully creates the illusion of human interac-
tion taking place impromptu.
By a quarrel, or a conflict, defined as a situation “in which
actors use conflict behaviour against each other to attain in-
compatible goals and/or to express their hostility” (Bartos and
Wehr 2002: 13) we mean an episode of confrontational or di-
harmonious interaction among personages (e.g. family mem-
bers, spouses, friends, lovers) which is initiated by the speaker

1 Here and further the translation from Russian into English is mine – J.K.
14 Beyond Philology 20/1

demonstrating his/her hostile or aggressive intention towards

the hearer, or when the speaker sends the signal to the hearer
concerning the incompatibility of his/her and the hearer’s cer-
tain cognitive structures.
The qualitative method embracing both the elements of the
speech-act approach and the elements of the sociolinguistic ap-
proach alongside with the method of non-experimental data col-
lection were applied in the study.

3. Theoretical background

The theoretical background upon which the discussion expands

is provided by: first, P. Brown and S. Levinson’s (1987) ideas
concerning politeness being a constraint observed in human
communicative behaviour intended to maintain or enhance
communicative concord or comity. The authors’ conception of
politeness revolves around the notion of face as a positive image
derived from Erving Hoffman (1967). According to the scholars,
it splits into “negative face: the basic claim to territories, per-
sonal preserves, rights to non-distraction – i.e. to freedom of ac-
tion and freedom of imposition” and “positive face: the positive
consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the de-
sire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of claimed
by interactants” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). In polite inter-
action both the speaker’s face and the hearer’s face have to be
attended to, face-threatening acts should be avoided; despite
the fact that “the content of face will differ in different cultures”
mutual knowledge of members’ face and the social necessity to
orient oneself to it in interaction, are universal (Brown and Lev-
inson 1987: 61–68); second, the ideas concerning the dimen-
sions intended to measure different cultures with the Uncer-
tainty Avoidance dimension being of great relevance to the study
(Hofstede et.al. 2010: 187–234). It is the Uncertainty Avoidance
dimension that correlates with expressivity, aggression, and
open manifestation of one’s emotions; third, semantic and func-
tional categorisation of expletives (Stenstrӧm 1991). As for the
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 15

semantic classification of taboo items, Stenstrӧm divides them

into three broad categories – these related to religion (heaven
and hell), sex and the human body.
In terms of the functions expletives can have, Stenstrӧm
(1991) and Crystal (2019) have similar ideas; thus, Stenstrӧm
differentiates between interactive, or “reaction signals”, which
show the hearer’s reaction to a message, and “go-on signals”,
which encourage the current speaker to continue, or indicate
social solidarity, and non-interactive that are used mainly as
emotional amplifiers that give relief to surges of emotional en-
ergy. But regardless of whether they have an interactive or non-
interactive role, they always mirror the speaker’s emotional in-
volvement to some extent. Crystal (2019: 185), in his turn, high-
lights two important social functions of swearing, that of social
distance, as “when a group of youths display their contempt for
social conventions by swearing loudly in public or writing ob-
scene graffiti on walls” and that of marking social solidarity, as
“when a group develops identical swearing habits”.

4. Some notes on the term taboo

and the previous research

Since the study focuses on the use of taboo language, it seems

that the term needs further elucidation. As pointed out by Mag-
nus (2011: 5),

the word taboo is Tongan in origin and was used in that social
framework in rather complicated ways to refer to sacred places re-
served for goods, kings, priests and chiefs. The word was borrowed
into English by Captain James Cook in his 1777 book Voyage into
the Pacific Ocean. Whatever the original meaning, it rapidly became
used in English to denote something forbidden.

According to Hughes (1991: 462–3), the term has now come to

denote “any social indiscretion that ought to be avoided and has
acquired the modern meaning of ‘offensive’ and grossly impolite
16 Beyond Philology 20/1

rather than strictly forbidden”. Various lexical items whose use

is restricted due to certain social and cultural constraints may
be referred to as expletives, swearing, curse words, obscenities.
In order to qualify as swearing, an utterance must violate cer-
tain taboos that are or have been regarded as in principle invi-
olable in the cultures concerned. According to Hughes (1991:
4), “swearing shows a curious convergence of the high and the
low, the sacred and the profane. In its early stages swearing was
related to the spell, the charm, the curse, forms seeking to in-
voke a higher power to change the world or support the truth-
fulness of a claim”. A similar definition of swearing is found in
Kusov (2004: 74): “Брань – злоупотребление божественным,
так как священное слово используется на „бытовом”
уровне в сугубо личных, „корыстных” целях, причем не
в отведенное ритуальным актом время на упоминание
священного имени” [‘Filthy language is the overindulgence in
the divine, since a sacred word is being used in an ‘everyday’
context and serves to achieve one’s personal, ‘selfish’ goals at
the moment which is not circumscribed by a ritual act as ap-
propriate for such a word to be uttered’]. Cliff Goddard (2015)
emphasizes the fact that “swearing stands at the crossroads of
multiple fields of study: pragmatics, including interactional
pragmatics and impoliteness studies, sociolinguistics, social
history; descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the phi-
losophy of language”. The linguist differentiates between “swear
words” and “curse words” by saying that “for swear words, the
situation is that someone ‘feels something bad in one moment’,
while with curse words, the situation is that someone ‘feels
something bad towards someone else’. In other words, swear
words are thought of primarily in terms of 'venting’
a speaker’s immediate bad feelings, while curse words are
thought of as being used ‘against’ someone else”, noting, how-
ever, that there is that component of “offensiveness” that both
curse words and swear words share as “many people feel some-
thing bad when they hear words of this kind”. Murphy (2010:
164) emphasizes the uniqueness of curse words “because they
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 17

provide an emotional intensity to speech that noncurse words

cannot achieve”.
Expletives also fall under the term taboo and are defined by
Stenstrӧm (1991: 240) as a “set of words and expressions that
are sometimes referred to as ‘swearwords’. Words of this type
that are totally or partly prohibited in social intercourse are of-
ten referred to as ‘taboo words’”.
Crystal’s (2019: 184) definition seems to be congruent with
the ones provided earlier. According to the scholar,

a few dozen lexemes comprise the special category of taboo lan-

guage – items which people avoid using in polite society, either be-
cause they believe them harmful or feel them embarrassing or of-
fensive. The possibility of harm may be genuinely thought to exist,
in the case of notions to do with and the supernatural, or there may
be merely a vague discomfort deriving from half-believed supersti-
tion. Embarrassment tends to be associated with the sexual act and
its consequences. Offensiveness relates to the various substances
exuded by the body, and to the different forms of physical, mental,
and social abnormality.

Taboo language, expletives and swearwords have been exten-

sively studied by a number of linguists (Jay 1999, Stenstrӧm
1991, McEnery and Xiao (2003) 2004, McEnery 2005, Allan and
Burridge 2006, Goddard 2015, Kusov 2004, Zhelvis 1997). Mag-
nus Ljung’s (2011) book Swearing: A Cross-Cultural Linguistic
Study appears to be a most exhaustive study of the forms, uses,
and actual instances of swearing in English and twenty-four
other languages of the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Finno-
Ugric language families, among others. The author elaborates
on the subcategories of swearing. He uses the distinction be-
tween function and theme as the main aspects of the taxonomy
provided in his study. When it comes to gender differences, it is
Stenstrӧm (1991: 240–242) who investigates into male and fe-
male expletive repertoires and concludes that female speakers
were more inclined to use expletives related to “heaven”, their
expletives were more “other-oriented” as women typically use
18 Beyond Philology 20/1

expletives to give feedback, whereas men preferred expletives

related to “sex” and “hell”, and were more self-oriented thus
lending extra weight to their words. Murphy’s (2010) book Cor-
pus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Gender and Age in Female
Talk could be given as an example of impressive and thorough
study providing an account of the degree of variation in taboo
language, in terms of frequency and use, which exists within
and across different age groups.
Despite the aforementioned studies into taboo language, it
would seem that further cross-cultural investigation is needed,
as research of this kind is extremely scarce.

5. Discussion and results

5.1. Semantic and functional patterns

in the English corpus

On the basis of the identified conflicts, or quarrels, in the Eng-

lish corpus (the total number of lines is 466) 74 instances of the
use of taboo language (50 were used by the men, 24 were used
by the women) have been detected. Semantically, following
Stenstrӧm’s (1991) classification, the instances found in the
male corpus can be attributed to the following categories:

(1) out of 50 taboo vocabulary items used by the men 28

items pertain to the sex category (e.g. f…cking dirty
world, f…ck off, I could f…cking kill you);
(2) 14 items pertain to the body category (e.g. there’s not
a pissing soul I can call a mate, shit, c…nt);
(3) 7 items fall under the category of religion, hell in partic-
ular (e.g. bloody hell, What the hell’s this about?);
(4) 1 item pertains to the category of religion, heaven in par-
ticular (e.g. For God’s sake).

Semantically the instances found in the female corpus can be

attributed to the following categories:
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 19

(1) out of 24 taboo vocabulary items used by the women 11

items pertain to the sex category (e.g. f…cking that im-
portant, that’s f…cking rich);
(2) 6 items pertain to the body category (e.g. You are still
fart-arsing, You are just pissing me off);
(3) 2 items pertain to the religion category, hell, in particu-
lar (e.g. bloody hell);
(4) 2 items pertain to the religion category, heaven, in par-
ticular (e.g. For Christ’s sake, Jesus);
(5) 2 items ‘bitch’ and ‘cow’ should be attributed to the an-
imal category, which is not present in Stenstrӧm’s clas-
sification.

It is noteworthy that the items falling under the sex and body
category outnumber the items pertaining to the religion category
in the corpora of both genders under analysis with women being
slightly more sensitive towards religion. The results obtained co-
incide with the results reported by Murphy (2010: 132–177). Ac-
cording to the author, f…cking appears to be the most frequent
amplifier in male corpus and the second most frequent in female
corpus, what is more, f…ck followed by piss and shit is the most
common expletive in the female corpus.
The examples falling under the religion category are less nu-
merous, which can be accounted for by the fact that religion as
a theme is tabooed to some extent. As pointed out by Hughes
(1991: 56), the stronger the taboo, the larger the number of
avoidance forms. Thus, for example, the number of euphemistic
expressions based on God is quite impressive. The list of euphe-
misms involving the word God, and the year of their earliest rec-
orded use in the Oxford English Dictionary, would begin with
gog (1350s), cokk (1386), cod (1569), and include such later
forms as gosh (1743), golly (1734), gracious (1760s), by George
(1842), Drat (= God rot) (1844), Doggone (=God-Damn) (1851),
and Great Scott (1884). The strongest taboo word, c…nt, in its
turn, has accumulated around 700 avoidance forms. McEnery
(2006: 36) also refers to c…nt as the strongest-rated swearword
20 Beyond Philology 20/1

in English. Two examples of c…nt have been detected in the

male corpus. It should be pointed out, however, that the word
for the female sex organ in Russian is also rated as the strong-
est. As Zhelvis (2003) points out, «в сравнении с этим словом
бледнеет даже пресловутый русский мат в его узком понима-
нии, довольно прочно занявший позиции даже в современ-
ной художественной литературе» [‘even the notorious Russian
foul language, which has become firmly positioned in contem-
porary fiction, fades, when compared to this word’]. The reason
for such a cross-linguistic coincidence should be looked for in
religious and mythical cosmology. According to Kusov (2004:
69),

именно Вода, считавшаяся первоэлементом перерождения,

и Рыба-прародительница, являвшаяся верховным божеством
у язычников в праиндоевропейскую общность, дали львиную
долю семасиологических единиц, используемых в настоящий
момент в качестве основы современного инвективного слово-
употребления ряда индоевропейских языков
[it is Water considered as a basic element of regeneration and Fish
the Progenitress being a superior pagan deity in the times of the
Proto-Indo-European past that have yielded a huge number of se-
masiological items now being used as the basis of the contemporary
invective vocabulary in a number of Indo-European languages].

Rawson (1989: 107 cited in Zhelvis 2003) traces the word c…nt
back to the 11th century, and ultimately to the primeval desig-
nation of the “quintessence of femininity”, probably, kuni, “wife”
or “woman” in a hypothetical protolanguage. His other assump-
tion is made on the basis of the Heritage Dictionary; the word
could have originated from the Indo-European root ku-, which
initially had a meaning of “empty space”, “a round object”, “an
object embracing something”, “a lump, a protrusion” in Ger-
manic languages.
Bastard and bollocks would be among the ones least fre-
quently used and detected only in the male corpus. As Magnus
(Magnus 2011: 172) points out, bastard came to English via
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 21

French ultimately from Latin bastardus, itself a derivation from

Latin bastum “packsaddle”. Like the Old French expression fils
de bast “son of the packsaddle”, it suggests that somebody’s fa-
ther is a mule driver “who uses his saddle for a pillow and is
gone by morning” as the ODE puts it. It is an etymology which
lies close to similar terms in other languages, for instance, Ara-
bic and Mandarin.
In terms of functional definition, it can be claimed that no
taboo items were used as “go-on” signals, that is, none of the
items were used as an interactive device, what is more, they did
not mark social solidarity either.
The function the taboo items fulfilled in the quarrels could be
defined as the demonstration of the emotional involvement of
the speaker, which could be further divided into: (1) revealing
one’s feelings and (2) expressing one’s negative emotions to-
wards the hearer/interlocutor. To put it another way, “taboo
words are seen to serve an over-ridingly emotive or expressive
function, being used most often to get rid of nervous energy
when under stress, especially when one is angry, frustrated or
under stress” (Murphy 2010: 168).
When it comes to revealing one’s feelings, the taboo items
function as a part of “emotion leakage”, which is referred to as
face-threatening act damaging one’s positive face (Brown and
Levinson 1987: 68). The expression of one’s negative feelings to-
wards the hearer embraces such speech acts as the speech act
of insult, criticism, accusation, disapproval and create atmos-
phere dangerous to the hearer’s positive face. Speech acts of
threat and order are said to attack the interlocutor’s negative
face. Let us consider the following example:

(1) BETH: That’s your bloody fault! I was trying to help you and
you have to go and cause an argument!
(2) SHERRY: Why can’t you just let me get on?
(3) BETH: You bloody pig-headed cow!
(4) SHERRY: You can’t just let me get on with my life!
(5) BETH: I was just trying to help you.
(6) SHERRY: You have to interfere.
22 Beyond Philology 20/1

(7) BETH: I have just had enough of you, young lady!

(8) SHERRY: I’m twenty-three years of age, for Christ’s sake!
(9) BETH: And you treat this place like a hotel.
(10) SHERRY: Well, why don’t you fucking throw me out then?
(11) BETH: Well, why don’t you just pack your bags and go then?
(D. Eldridge “Summer Begins”, act 2, sc. 3, 2005)

Line (3) is an example of the speech act of insult aggravated by

the amplifier bloody. By performing the act, Beth attacks her
daughter’s positive face. By expressing her irritation in (10) and
making a suggestion spiced with the taboo item f…cking Beth
threatens her mother’s negative face.
According to the Uncertainty-avoidance dimension formu-
lated by Geert Hofstede et al. (2010: 187-234), Russian culture
should be regarded as “anxious” and expressive, where emo-
tions are shown openly. Whereas, in Anglo-Saxon culture, on
the contrary, aggression and emotions are not supposed to be
displayed. Any display of emotions, negative, in particular, is
met with social disapproval. The expression of negative emo-
tions when having a row definitely means that taboos are being
smashed and politeness norms are being ignored.

5.2. Semantic and functional patterns

in the Russian corpus

On the basis of the identified conflicts, or quarrels, in the Rus-

sian corpus (the total number of lines is 473) 65 instances of
the use of taboo language (44 were used by the men, 21 were
used by the women) have been detected. Semantically, following
Stenstrӧm’s (1991) classification, the instances found in the
male corpus can be attributed to the following categories:

(1) out of 65 taboo items 20 fall under the sex category (e.g.
е… твою мать, б…дь ‘f…ck’);
(2) 14 pertain to the body category (e.g. на хрен ‘f…ck off’,
х…й его знает ‘who the hell knows’ , дерьмо ‘shit’);
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 23

(3) two items pertain to the religion category, hell, in partic-

ular (e.g. черт ‘devil’); no instances of the items pertain-
ing to heaven have been detected;
(4) eight pejoratives that do not fall under any categories
defined by Stenstrӧm have been detected in the corpus
(сука ‘bitch’, щенок ‘puppy’, пидарас ‘faggot, идиот ‘id-
iot’, мудак ‘dickhead’, подонок ‘scoundrel’, сопляк
‘whelp’, тряпка ‘softie, milksop’).

Semantically the instances found in the female corpus can be

attributed to the following categories:

(1) out of 21 taboo vocabulary items used by the women 12

items pertain to the sex category (e.g. е… твою мать ,
б…дь ‘f…ck’, семь е…нутых лет ‘seven f…cken years’);
(2) four items pertain to the body category (e.g. х…ня
‘f…cken shit’);
(3) no items pertaining to the religion category have been de-
tected in the corpus;
(4) five pejoratives have been detected in the corpus (e.g.
урод ‘freak’, дрянь ‘nit’, дура ‘fool’, слюнтяй ‘driveller’).

It is noteworthy that the items falling under the sex category

outnumber the items pertaining to the body and religion cate-
gory with б…дь ‘f…ck’ being the most frequent amplifier in the
corpuses of the two genders under analysis. Items falling under
the religion category are the least frequent and no instances of
taboo items referring to religion used by women have been de-
tected in the corpus. The importance of religion for “anxious”
cultures is undisputable, since it “is a way of relating to the
transcendental forces that are assumed to control people's per-
sonal future. Religion helps followers to accept the uncertainties
against which one cannot defend oneself” (Hofstede et. al. 2010:
189). Most probably, this fact could account for a certain degree
of sensitivity of Russian culture towards religious topics and
their being taboo.
24 Beyond Philology 20/1

In terms of functional definition it can be claimed that no ta-

boo items in the Russian corpus were used as “go-on” signals,
that is, none of the items were used as an interactive device,
what is more, they did not mark social solidarity either.
The function the taboo items fulfilled in quarrels could be de-
fined as the demonstration of the emotional involvement of the
speaker, which could be further divided into: (1) revealing one’s
feelings and (2) expressing one’s negative emotions towards the
hearer (primarily through the use of pejoratives). Let us consider
the following example:

(1) ОТЕЦ: Да как ты смеешь?

(2) СЫН: Засадить Ларисе Петровне! Да чему ты вообще можешь
меня научить? Врать? Плевать на семью? Да меня тошнит от
этого, прям в эту яму тошнит!
(3) ОТЕЦ: Что ты в этом понимаешь, щенок!
(4) СЫН: А что тут понимать? Что? Говно вы все. Вот что
я понимаю. Все вы мужики – говно. Фрезеровщики, токари,
офицеры, инженеры, футболисты – все вы врете! Врете всю
жизнь!
(5) ОТЕЦ: Тряпка! Ты, тряпка, молчи!
(6) СЫН: Лучше быть тряпкой, чем говном!
Отец берет лопату замахивается на сына.
(7) ОТЕЦ: Я тебя сейчас!..
(8) СЫН: Ну, давай, давай! Заруби меня здесь!
(9) ОТЕЦ: И зарублю! Зарублю!
(10) СЫН: Давай, руби!
(11) ОТЕЦ: Зарублю!
(А. Житковский «Посадить дерево», сцена 1, 2015)2

2
(1) FATHER: How dare you?
(2) SON: You fucked Larisa Petrovna! What can you teach me? How to
lie? How not to take care after your family? I am fed up with all this stuff.
(3) FATHER: You don’t get the point, whelp!
(4) SON: What point should I get? You all are a shit. That’s what I under-
stand. All men are a shit. Millers, turners, officers, engineers, footballers; you
all lie! You’ve been lying all your life!
(5) FATHER: Milksop! You, milksop, just shut up!
(6) SON: It’s better to be a milksop that a shit!
The father takes a shovel and tries to take a swing at the son.
(7) FATHER: I’ll…!
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 25

Lines (3) and (4) are mutual father’s and son’s positive face at-
tacks. The father uses the pejorative щенок ‘whelp’, ‘puppy’,
whereas the son employs the scatologism говно ‘shit’. Both
items indicate a certain degree of anger and irritation.
Despite the fact that Russian culture is more tolerant to-
wards open demonstration of emotions, it is taboo vocabulary
that matters a lot. As pointed out by Zhelvis (1997),

профанизация речи, обращенной к оппоненту, это, как прави-

ло, средство унизить оппонента, выразив свое презрение к не-
му. Чтобы добиться этого всего говорящий стремится эмоцио-
нально расцветить высказывание, придав ему своеобраз-
ные непристойные «детонирующие запятые» [‘profaning the
speech directed at the opponent is, as a rule, a means to humiliate
the opponent by expressing one’s contempt towards him/her. In
order to achieve this, the speaker attempts to colour his words by
adding certain indecent ‘detonating’ commas’].

What is more, it should be pointed out that when performing

speech acts of insult, criticism and accusation Russian inter-
actants employed a wider spectrum of pejoratives calling the
hearer names. These are examples of linguistic behavior that
can be hardly referred to as polite. It is noteworthy that Russian
interlocutors demonstrated a tendency towards “weaker” exple-
tives and used a number of euphemisms (e.g. хер ‘willie’,
гребаный ‘bloody’, трындец ‘sharks’).

6. Conclusions

On the basis of the analysis carried out in the study the follow-
ing conclusions can be drawn:

(8) SON: Go ahead! Go, go! Just chop me down!

(9) FATHER: I will! I will!
(10) SON: Do it!
(11) FATHER: I will! (A.Zhitkovsky “To Plant a Tree”, sc. 1, 2015)
26 Beyond Philology 20/1

(1) Despite different cultural contexts, the fact that Anglo-Saxon

and Russian cultures score differently on the Uncertainty Avoid-
ance dimension and the supposedly different content of face in
the two cultures, the personages demonstrate similar semantic
and functional patterns; i.e. the personages (both the men and
the women) involved in conflicts, or quarrels, employ a similar
repertoire of expletives: a) taboo items falling under the sex and
body categories outnumber the taboo items in the religion cate-
gory in both corpora under analysis; b) taboo items pertaining
to the religion category are the least numerous in both corpora
and include both items falling under the heaven category (used
by the women in the English corpus), the heaven and hell cate-
gory (used by the men in the English corpus), the hell category
(used by the men in the Russian corpus); the absence of the
strongest-rated taboo item (i.e. the item naming the female sex
organ), the tendency towards the use of “weaker” expletives and
a wider spectrum of pejoratives in the Russian corpus should
be attributed to culture particulars.

(2) a wide spectrum of negative emotions experienced by the

personages in the quarrels is rendered through the extensive
use of taboo language, whose function is non-interactive, i.e.
intended to mirror the speaker’s emotional involvement.

(3) it can be claimed that face as the most valuable personal

possession is devalorized in both cultures under analysis; po-
liteness as a constraint ensuring communicative concord and
comity is not observed. When it comes to revealing one’s feel-
ings, the taboo items function as a part of “emotion leakage”,
which is referred to as a face-threatening act damaging one’s
positive face. The expression of one’s negative feelings towards
the hearer embraces such speech acts as the speech act of in-
sult, criticism, accusation, disapproval and create the atmos-
phere dangerous to his/her positive face. Speech acts of threat
and order are said to attack the hearer’s negative face.
Kirejeva: The use of taboo language… 27

The reason for the symmetry discussed above may lie in the
fact that the cultures and languages under analysis are not ty-
pologically and geographically distant. On the other hand, such
a symmetry may be pre-conditioned by the atmosphere of the
epoch with its social anomy and aggressiveness; it can also be
accounted for just by the manifestation of the biological human
essence.

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Jelena Kirejeva
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0640-341X
Vilnius university
Faculty of Philology
Institute of Applied Linguistics
Center for Multilingual Studies
Universiteto g. 5
Vilnius, LT-01131
Lithuania
[email protected]