The Swearing Study...

The National Science Foundation is paying more than $200,000 for a study whose results may be unprintable.

The grant's title, "Expressive Content and the Semantics of Contexts," doesn't sound exciting, until you figure out what "expressive content" means.

Christopher Potts , a linguist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will catalog and analyze the use of obscenities, vulgarities, and racial epithets as well as titles and honorifics. All are words or phrases that express emotion, or whose absence can convey an emotion, such as disrespect.

Post a Comment

0 Comments: