Corpus-based Investigation of Synonymous Cursing Expressions, with a Focus on Crap

Abstract

This paper first reviews the discussions and findings of literature on English profanities or cursing expressions such as Jay (1981), Jay and Janschewitz (2008), Beck (2009), and Fin (2017) and highlights some issues observed in such literature. Some of the issues are related to a limited range of target expressions and the lack of detailed analyses of each expletive in its typical context. Among numerous cursing expressions that have not received close attention, this paper particularly focuses on crap and cut the crap. Using Wordbanks Online, the usage and functions of these expressions are investigated, described, and compared with their synonymous expressions. The retrieved contexts from the corpus, as well as the corpus query language (CQL) used in the investigation, are presented along with the discussion.