| Popis: |
The issues of language impoliteness, verbal aggression and taboo violation have only recently come under a more intensive scientific scrutiny. The present paper gives a brief discussion of the problems of verbal taboos and swearing from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central question addressed here is to what extent different themes recurring in verbal aggression are universal across cultures and to what extent they are particular to given languages. There appears to be a fairly universal set of topics which speakers of different languages use in the activity of swearing. However, there are some interesting individual characteristics across cultures, which pertain to the presence and strength of particular taboos. Taboos and swearing are also subject to constant cultural evolution. The degree of universality of particular taboo subjects may depend on whether a particular taboo has primarily biological or cultural motivations. |
