A Pragmatic Study Of Bad Language In Twitter Corpus: Insights From Collocational Networks

Bad language,following its natural implication,reflects a negative tone of our everyday-used language,which is often frown at when hearing of it and also left underresearching in academic circle.However,anyone digging into it finds that its utility and ubiquity comes far beyond expectation and is even more indispensable and irreplaceable than other normal words,which invite amounting scholars to look at its unique function-oriented characteristics,especially linguists who explore how certain communicational goals are achieved by way of employing bad language in different contexts,on basis of field studies from earlier years.However,what constitute the general picture of implicated functions or usages of bad language have never been explicitly cleared.As such,this paper is attributed to investigation of bad language on cyber space,to be more specific,the social networking site Twitter is chosen to be a pool of analyzing resources,which could be taken as a mirror of real life these days and is left unresearched in this kind,with the attempt to discover the evolving usage of bad language and more importantly its functions and usages under network background,that is to say what is actually happening now compared with field records of previous studies as well as what are the usages reflected in the process of producing bad language by which a comprehensive understanding of its pragmatic nature could be gained.The data analyzed are thousands pieces of posts from Twitter,which are highly colloquial in nature and from the perspective of first-person narrator which involve naturally occurring interaction among multiple parties.Besides,referring to methodology,the concept of collocational networks is adopted in order to facilitate identification of multiword associations,which is reportedly capable of approaching the mind of speaker through mapping lexical connections in discourse,thus leads the way to fulfill our purpose here,to explore how people take advantage of bad languages as a tool to fulfill individual or social functions.The results show that bad language is primarily employed to express a complex series of emotions,and it also witnesses the gradual separation of its actual usage from original semantic property given by socio-cultural development so as to become pragmatically critical,both of which are recurring points made by lots of researchers before.To be more precise,bad language in corpus is miscellaneously taken as a sign of both comradeship and hostility depending on contexts,and it is constantly referred to as a matter of importance,in certain cases it is even a marker of racial identity.Some rarely mentioned features are also identified here,such as bad language demonstrates a tendency of clustering to reinforce emotional weight and it actually works with predictable rules to meet certain communicational goal.Except the contribution to analysis of practical performance of bad language,an integrated system of classification has also been proposed to account for a shortfall of previous researches by addressing different roles every bad word has played in corpus.