Proposal

We (Ellie, Hope, Jake, Jaya, and Natalie) have decided to focus our investigation on the social and cultural influences on taboo language around the world. These will include issues of sexism, racism, defecation, sex, family, and how these differ in significance in English and other languages. Our investigation will aim to answer the following questions: ‘What makes lexis taboo?’, ‘Which words or phrases are considered most offensive and why?’, ‘How much does the taboo language of English differ to that of other languages, and why?’, ‘Is there sufficient evidence to suggest that it does differ?’, ‘How has taboo language in English changed over time and why?’

               The methods we will use to investigate this topic will be: a questionnaire about which taboo terms are most offensive to which ethnic groups and why people believe this is so; a number of interviews with people whose first language is not English about their impressions of taboo words from their native tongue and English; a corpus analysis into which words are commonly used; and a variety of literature to help support our findings and investigate further into the topic. Whilst the questionnaire will allow us to see if our predictions about people’s opinions about words are correct, the corpus study will tell us more about the frequency of words, the genre in which they are used, the gender of the person who is using them, and the time period in which they are used. The interviews will help to highlight which issues have the highest influence on taboo lexis in which languages. Some of the literature that we think will be relevant to our study includes: An Encyclopaedia of Swearing: the social history of oaths, profanity, foul language, and ethnic slurs in the English-speaking world by G. Hughes, 2006; Cursing in America: A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts, in the movies, in the schoolyard, and on the streets by T. Jay, 1992; Taboo expressions in American Sign Language by Mirus et al., 2012; Fk yea I swear: cursing and gender in MySpace by M. Corpora, 2008.

               One of the potential problems that has arisen when discussing this topic is the fact that investigating taboo language involves using potentially offensive lexis when conducting the questionnaires and interviews, and even when presenting our findings to our peers. We aim to address this issue by including a consent form at the start of the questionnaire, which offers the participant the opportunity to withdraw themselves at any time and warns them of the personal nature of the questions and use of potentially offensive lexis. We will include a similar disclaimer at the beginning of each interview. As well as this, we will offer an ‘I’d prefer not to say’ option for each of the questions of the questionnaire so that participants do not need to discuss anything which makes them feel uncomfortable. We will present our findings to our peers at the exhibition at the end of term, making use of visual representations of our data through pie charts, bar charts, other graphs, and tables.