A Pragmatic Study of Profanities in Compliment Speech Acts on Public Twitter Accounts

Aprilia, Kartika Putri (2019) A Pragmatic Study of Profanities in Compliment Speech Acts on Public Twitter Accounts. Masters thesis, Universitas Andalas.

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Abstract

Profanities are understood as particular forms of a language that some people in a culture judge as intolerable in certain settings. However, it was found that profanities can be used to convey positive emotions, such as complimenting. This research aims to describe the linguistic forms, themes, pragmatic meanings, and pragmatic functions of profanities in compliment speech acts on Twitter. This research is categorized as descriptive research with a qualitative approach. The data were collected by observing the profanity-contained tweets on Twitter. The data were analyzed by using the distributional method (the basic technique and the seven extended techniques: deletion, substitution, extension, insertion, reversion, transformation, and repetition.) and the identity method (by referring to the theories of Hughes, Ljung, Kreidler, and Spears). The results of the data analysis are presented by using informal method. The results of this study demonstrate: (1) linguistic forms of the profanities are words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections) and phrases (noun phrases), (2) the themes of the profanities are ethnic/racial, family, prostitution, animal, religious/supernatural, scatological, sex organ, and sexual activity themes, (3) the pragmatic meanings of the profanities are as ‘wow’, ‘very’, ‘great’, ‘girl’, ‘guy’, ‘people’, ‘pick up line’, ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘stuff’, ‘ a good…’ and to accentuate why and noun, and (4) the pragmatic functions of the profanities are as adjectival intensifiers, adverbial intensifiers, anaphoric use of epithets, emphases, expletives, and noun supports. Adjective-formed profanities functioning as adjectival intensifiers are found to be the least dominant since profanities are usually utilized to accentuate the compliments, which are in the forms of adjectives.

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