The Pragmatics of Swearing in Persian

Swearing has long been used by humans across different cultures for two main motives, to represent intense emotion through the use of profane, offensive words; and tomake a serious assertion under oath for the purpose of justifying a fact, promising, pleading or pledging. Studies in the field have mainly concentrated on the former use of the speech act. This paper, however, aims at studying the latter purpose of use with special focus on the types, pragmatic functions, frequency of types and functions of swearwords among Iranian people in urban context of the country. The research is carried out through aqualitative design with audio recordings of natural daily conversations of people regardless of their age, gender, social, professional or educational status or background as the maininstrument of data collection. In some cases, emails, messages and field notes are used ascomplementary instruments to gather data where audio recordings would violate ethical issues. The corpus was collected within a period of seven months and mounted up to 47instances of recorded natural daily conversations and 09 emails, messages and field notes. Conversation analysis was used to organize the swearwords in three main types, religious/sacred terms, kin terms, and expressionistic/cultural terms. The pragmaticfunctions derived from the corpus based on the context included promise, take an oath, plead, convince, humor, pray and comity. The frequencies of type amassed the use of religious terms, equally frequency of function accrued taking an oath.

کلیدواژه ها:

swearing ، pragmatics ، speech act ، pragmatic function