英文摘要 |
The paper is a preliminary study on swear words as a type of epithets in earlier Southern Min playscripts. Swear words are a linguistic manifestation of the speaker's contempt toward the addressee, a subjective evaluative attitude beyond propositional meaning. It reflects the immediate interaction between interlocutors. The choice of swear words shows an intimate relationship between interlocutors with respect to their social status and intimate and distal emotional state. Swear words can often be used as vocatives and their main properties do not involve the projection of arguments by a predicate in VP. In terms of Rizzi's hierarchy of functional categories(Rizzi 1997), there are three major layers of functional categories: VP, TP and CP. Swear words featuring the emotive interaction occupies a position higher than Force in the split CP. Swear words fall into two types in terms of their grammatical function: (1)nominal phrases, and (2)predicative phrases. The former can but need not be vocatives, whereas the latter cannot be vocatives, but can be used to express the speaker's high emotional state with respect to the addressee. Both uses are conducive to the enhancement of solidarity between interlocutors in speech acts. In sum, the paper aims at exploring how swear words operate in contexts based on Southern Min playscripts of Ming and Qing periods(Wu 2001abcd, and Quanzhou 2010), ferret out the constraints of their uses and the principles underlying the interpersonal emotive communication. |