The semantics of profane quasi-verbs Social relations in a dynamic framework

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Paul Portner

Abstract

Though profane imprecations like F*** you! have received no attention in formal semantics, we might expect our theory of linguistic meaning to have something to say about such common expressions. In this paper, I discuss the nature of the meanings of profane quasi-verbs (Quang 1971) that function syntactically like f*** in the example above, and I provide a formal model that can account for some important aspects of their meaning and conversational use. This analysis throws light on the role of social relations in semantics and pragmatics.


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