Vulgarism

Jūratė Ruzaitė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
jurate.ruzaite@vdu.lt

A vulgarism is a word or expression that makes explicit and offensive reference to sex, bodily functions, or other taboo subjects. Vulgarity, also referred to as profanity or use of swear/curse words, is considered crude, offensive, or impolite, often contains strong language, and is explicit. Thus, vulgarisms are generally not appropriate in formal or polite language. They are often used to express strong emotions, frustration, anger, or emphasis, but they can also be offensive, disrespectful, or inappropriate in certain contexts. On the other hand, vulgarisms can function as powerful linguistic tools that can convey solidarity or group identity within informal settings, such as among close friends or within certain subcultures. Depending on the social context, the pragmatic use of vulgar language can signal intimacy, rebellion, or humour.

Vulgarity may serve as an intensifier to emphasise subjective opinions, as a means to offend or convey hate speech towards others, to describe vulgar activities, or to indicate an informal tone in conversation. As such, vulgar language is frequently included in widely used sentiment and emotion analysis lexicons.

The use of vulgar language is influenced by pragmatic or contextual factors, including the interpersonal relationship between speakers or their social characteristics such as gender, occupation, religiosity, culture, or social status, which reflect differing norms about politeness and taboo language. For instance, some research indicates that males tend to employ profanity more frequently than females. In research on social media, certain vulgar words were identified as indicative of demographic traits such as political ideology, age group, or regional background.

Keywords: impoliteness, offensive language, taboo language

Related Entries: Evaluative Language, Impoliteness, Insults

References:
Malmasi, S., & Zampieri, M. (2018). Challenges in discriminating profanity from hate speech. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 30(2), 187–202.
McEnery, T. (2004). Swearing in English: Bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. Routledge
Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2013). Crowdsourcing a word-emotion association lexicon. Computational Intelligence, 29(3), 436–465.
Preoţiuc-Pietro, D., Liu, Y., Hopkins, D., & Ungar, L., (2017). Beyond binary labels: Political ideology prediction of twitter users. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), volume 1, pages 729–740