“Adesso m’incazzo!”: Swearwords as resources for managing negative emotions in interaction
10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15263
Drawing on Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we explore how interactants express in situ emotions that have been identified as negative – annoyance, anger, etc. – by displaying their stance and fishing for affiliation, and by (dis-)affiliating in response (Stivers 2008). Our entry point are lexical resources mobilized in this interactional process of emotion management: swearwords. Swearwords have received limited attention in interactional studies (Butler and Fritzgerald 2011; Hoey et al. 2021), but they are versatile resources in Italian talk-in-interaction. Grammatically, they are interjections, verbs, nouns, phrases, sentences, etc.; interactionally, they are found in turn-initial position, mid-turn, and turn-final position; they can be only a segment of a turn or occupy an entire turn. Our analysis reveals that swearwords are a) either used to reinforce the speaker’s stance, together with other elements (lexico-syntactical resources, facial expressions, changes in voice quality, etc.), and they are treated as fishing for affiliation; b) or they emerge as the main resource to display urgency and exasperation and are treated as directives. Using swearwords allow participants to build and shift to different interactional contexts: from jocular/playful situations (in the dinner) to serious and urgent scenarios (in the business meeting). Moreover, the target of the emotions (and the swearwords) can be either outside the interaction, in the context of tellings (reported stories), or complaint sequences; or inside the interaction, in the context of instruction sequences, where recipients need not only to affiliate but to respond. A sequential and situated analysis of swearwords shows how negative emotions emerge and are locally managed in interactants’ lexical choices, their stance projection and responses. Thus, we aim to contribute to understandings of how emotions enable interactants to achieve intersubjectivity (Haddington 2007), playing a major role in the ways we experience the world around us and display this knowledge and understanding to our surroundings.
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“Adesso m’incazzo!”: Swearwords as resources for managing negative emotions in interaction
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Maria Eleonora Sciubba
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“Adesso m’incazzo!”: Swearwords as resources for managing negative emotions in interaction
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Emozioni: sentirle, parlarne, tradurle                                       mediAzioni 33 (2022)
                                                                                  ISSN 1974-4382




     “ADESSO M’INCAZZO!”: SWEARWORDS AS RESOURCES FOR
        MANAGING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN INTERACTION
                         VIRGINIA CALABRIA, MARIA ELEONORA SCIUBBA
                  KU - LEUVEN/UNIVERSITÉ DE NEUCHÂTEL, TILBURG UNIVERSITY

virgina.calabria@kuleuven.be, M.E.Sciubba@tilburguniversity.edu



Citation: Calabria, Virginia, Maria Eleonora Sciubba (2022) “‘Adesso m’incazzo!’:
Swearwords as resources for managing negative emotions in interaction”, in Greta Zanoni,
Serena Zuccheri Emozioni: sentirle, parlarne, tradurle, MediAzioni 33: D4‒D28,
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15263, ISSN 1974-4382.



Abstract: Drawing on Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we explore how
interactants express in situ emotions that have been identified as negative – annoyance,
anger, etc. – by displaying their stance and fishing for affiliation, and by (dis-)affiliating in
response (Stivers 2008). Our entry point are lexical resources mobilized in this
interactional process of emotion management: swearwords. Swearwords have received
limited attention in interactional studies (Butler and Fritzgerald 2011; Hoey et al. 2021),
but they are versatile resources in Italian talk-in-interaction. Grammatically, they are
interjections, verbs, nouns, phrases, sentences, etc.; interactionally, they are found in turn-
initial position, mid-turn, and turn-final position; they can be only a segment of a turn or
occupy an entire turn. Our analysis reveals that swearwords are a) either used to reinforce
the speaker’s stance, together with other elements (lexico-syntactical resources, facial
expressions, changes in voice quality, etc.), and they are treated as fishing for affiliation; b)
or they emerge as the main resource to display urgency and exasperation and are treated
as directives. Using swearwords allow participants to build and shift to different
interactional contexts: from jocular/playful situations (in the dinner) to serious and urgent
scenarios (in the business meeting). Moreover, the target of the emotions (and the
swearwords) can be either outside the interaction, in the context of tellings (reported
stories), or complaint sequences; or inside the interaction, in the context of instruction
sequences, where recipients need not only to affiliate but to respond. A sequential and
situated analysis of swearwords shows how negative emotions emerge and are locally
managed in interactants’ lexical choices, their stance projection and responses. Thus, we
aim to contribute to understandings of how emotions enable interactants to achieve
intersubjectivity (Haddington 2007), playing a major role in the ways we experience the
world around us and display this knowledge and understanding to our surroundings.


Keywords: emotions; swearwords; anger; complaint; stance; affiliation; intersubjectivity;
interactional linguistics; conversation analysis; Italian talk-in-interaction.




Copyright © 2022
The text in this work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.                                            D4
D5                                                                                   CALABRIA, SCIUBBA


1. Introduction1

The aim of this contribution is to explore how interactants express, and respond to,
emotions that have been identified as negative, e.g., anger2, in situ. Our entry points
are lexical resources that are mobilized in this interactional process of emotion
management: swearwords. Swearwords have received limited attention in studies
of interaction but are versatile grammatical and interactional resources for
participants to express, respond to and manage their emotions.
     Emotions have been deemed beyond the scope of linguistic studies (cf.
Wierzbicka 1992a), namely by emic approaches such as Conversation Analysis (CA)
and Interactional Linguistics (IL) (cf. Peräkylä 2021), because regarded as an
intimate matter that belongs to the psychological and behavioral aspects of the mind
(cf. Gross 1998). Disciplines like CA and IL share a strong interest for the
systematicity of social interaction and are both informed by the idea that ‘there is
order at all points’ (Sacks 1992[1972]: 484), since the interactants jointly work to
ensure mutual understanding and display the lack thereof by accountable actions
and practices3 (cf. Sack, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974).The fact that emotion cannot
be subsumed under the category “action”, but is rather seen as an “accompaniment,
or overlay of verbal action” (Couper-Kuhlen 2016: 95) is somewhat problematic for
CA/IL approaches, because it does not necessarily surface and therefore it might not
be sequentially describable. However, there are instances when emotional displays
(and not only talk) do surface through embodied and verbal resources that index
specific emotions: “we won’t find that strong sorrow and joy are just distributed
over the course of the conversation but instead, there are real places for them to
occur” (Sacks 1992[1972]: 572). This idea has been recently taken up in CA and IL,
as there is interest not only in how emotions emerge and are managed in every-day
interactions, but also in how their displays are coordinated with the sequential
organization of social interactions (cf. Weatherall and Robles 2021; Peräkylä 2021;
Hoey et al. 2021). Namely, to describe the expression of feelings and attitudes, the
term affective stance4 is used to refer to the way in which emotions are made visible
by and for co-interactants (cf. Peräkylä and Sorjonen 2012); whereas affiliation
refers to the cooperative work done by the interactants (Stivers, Mondada and
Steensig 2011) in sharing their stance with each other5. When an interlocutor

1 We want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for contributing to clarifying some concepts and
strengthening our overall argument. Any remaining errors are solely our own.
2 Wierzbicka considers anger one of the “basic emotion concepts”, with happiness (1992: 539).
3 As people speak, they carry out social actions through their turns at talks. Turns are specifically

designed so that recipients are able to recognize what kind of action is being carried out (Schegloff
2007; Levinson 2012; Couper-Kuhlen 2018). The ways interactional resources (embodied and
verbal) are deployed so that they can be recognized as implementing a particular action is called
action formation, whereas how those turns are actually recognized by participants as carrying out a
particular “major action” is called action ascription (Levinson 2012; Couper-Kuhlen 2018). Whether
this action is actually recognized by participants or not will be evident in the following turns,
therefore the main job of constructing a turn is projecting “what the response must deal with in order
to count as an adequate next turn” (Levinson 2012: 107) and establishing intersubjectivity in
interaction. The “set of practices that guides action formation and ascription within specific settings”
forms activities (ibid.: 124).
4 Ochs (1996: 410) defines affective stance as “a mood, attitude, feeling and disposition, as well as

degrees of emotional intensity vis-a.-vis some focus of concern.”
5 cf. Stivers (2008) for affiliation in storytelling. For the author affiliating means: ‘‘that the hearer

displays support of and endorses the teller's conveyed stance” (2008: 35).
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expresses a stance, the other interlocutor might affiliate or disaffiliate, producing a
“convergence between the ‘doers’ of an action or bit of conduct and its recipients, as
co-producers of an increment of interactional and social reality” (Schegloff 1992:
1299). This process has been called intersubjectivity (cf. Sidnell 2014), and focus
has been put on the creation of intersubjective relationships (cf. Kärkkäinen 2006;
Haddington 2007; Stivers 2008; Couper-Kuhlen et al. 2021; among others), with an
alignment of perspectives, and collaborative work to ensure mutual understanding.
As Sorjonen et al. (2021) point out, intersubjectivity is not just established, but it
has to be maintained in the course of the interaction, as this is crucial for the co-
interactants’ mutual understanding: “Particular aspects of particular bits of conduct
that compose the warp and weft of ordinary social life provide occasions and
resources for understanding, which can also issue in problematic understandings.
And it is this situating of intersubjectivity that will be of interest here” (Schegloff
1992: 1299). Emotions are then, in this perspective a necessary component of the
interactants’ understanding of the social context surrounding them: “emotion is a
social phenomenon. It is organized and made visible as a consequential event
through systematic practices which are lodged within the processes of situated
interaction, used by participants to build in concert with each other the events that
make up their lifeworld” (Goodwin and Goodwin 2000: 252).
    In the present contribution we focus on the linguistic structures and practices
that interactants use and orient to in social interaction. More specifically we
investigate how swearwords are deployed to index various degrees of emotions, and
how emotions are displayed in the “places” where swearwords are uttered
Answering to the traditional CA question of “why that now?”, a speaker’s turn
containing a swearword might be there displaying negative emotion, or
implementing another action, i.e. teasing (see section 4.1). The emotional display is
punctually indexed through the lexical choice of swearwords6.
    Ex.1 shows a first illustration. This is taken from one of the two settings
analyzed, an informal dinner among friends7. Giulio (GIU) and Giorgio (GIO) are
waiting for their friends to arrive at Giulio’s house for dinner. Among them, Angela
(ANG), Giulio’s girlfriend, is late and has not communicated when she will arrive.
    The swearwords deployed in this interaction show great grammatical flexibility,
ranging from interjections (l. 26), noun modifiers (l. 30), verb constructions (ll. 31‒
33), and nouns (l. 37). Interactionally, they can be used a) to convey a negative
emotion, e.g., to display the climax8 of anger (adesso m’incazzo) in a turn (co-
occurring with other features of conversation, such us prosodic cues); b) to
reinforce a (negative) stance (based on their lexical meaning, una mazza ceppa di
niente); c) they can be recycled by co-participants in replies to the swearword
(incazzati), to display affiliation. Thanks to this high flexibility, swearwords are an
effective resource in the interactional management of emotions, as our analyses will
show.


6 Prosody and embodiement (face expression) also play a crucial role, but for lack of space they aren’t

always taken into account in the present paper.
7 See section 3 for a detailed description of the data and the methods, and section 4.3 for a detailed

analysis of ex.1 following ex.4.
8 Selting (2017: 2) defins climax as: “a displayed point of higher emotive involvement, a ‘high point’

of the story, which makes relevant the recipients’ affiliative responses”.
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2. Swearing across the world and in Italian

Swearing seems to be a prerogative of human communication: it is said to be
restricted to particular settings and categories of users, generally toward the lower
end of register and class (Butler and Fitzgerald 2011; Mohr 2013; Tartamella 2016;
Hoey et al. 2021). Although these authors consider swearing as gendered (male)
behavior, some recent studies have shown that girls can engage in ritual insults if
the context and situation is appropriate (Ehrlich and Meyerhoff 2014; Goodwin and
Kyratzis 2014).
     Swearing and swearwords, including profanity, expletives, vulgarity,
imprecations, insults, etc., are taboo words and expressions generally related to
religion, certain body parts or bodily excretions and actions, disease, sex, social
violence, death (Mohr 2013; Tartamella 2016; Hoey et al. 2021) and are ubiquitous
across ages, domains, and languages (Jay 2009; Ljung 2011; McEnery 2006; Napoli
and Hoeksema 2009). As shown also in our data, swearwords are very versatile
(Napoli and Hoeksema 2009) and may appear as exclamations (EN. fuck or IT.
cazzo), verb constructions (EN. are you shitting me or IT. m’incazzo), multiword
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constructions (EN. give a fuck or IT. fare lo stronzo), emphatic intensifiers (EN.
fucking or IT. mazza ceppa).
     From a semantic point of view, swearwords may be literal and denotative (‘they
fucked’/fottevano/fotterono/hanno fottuto), but they are more often nonliteral and
connotative (‘I feel like shit’/mi sento una merda) (Hoey et al. 2021). Some lexical
items are taboo words in all their uses: in Italian the word cazzo and all its derivates,
like the English word fuck (Napoli and Hoeksema 2009), are taboo in both the literal
(body part: penis) and figurative, non-literal sense (as intensifier, exclamations,
etc.)9; other lexical items (bloody, IT. scopare) can be used both denotatively and
figuratively (IT. scopare used literally means to sweep the floor, figuratively to fuck).
Allan and Burridge (2006) argue that the use of dysphemism is emotionally charged,
and draw a continuum between dysphemism, euphemism and ortophemism, where
the latter is the semantically neutral lexical choice. Studies of swearing and taboo
words in Italian span different methodological approaches: psycholinguistics
(Tartamella 2016;) sociolinguistics (D’Achille 2010; Dardano et al. 1992; Faloppa
2004, 2011, 2020), lexical and textual linguistics (Galli de’ Paratesi 2009), and
translation (Pavesi and Malinverno 2000), and are mainly concerned with lexical
properties and etymology of taboo words (Alba et al. 2019; Lotti 1990; Rossi 2011;
Trifone 2012). Whereas studies of the use of swearing in interaction are limited to
insults from a pragmatics perspective (Bazzanella 2020; Alfonzetti 2020; Alfonzetti
and Spampinato 2012; Pugliese and Zanoni 2019). Tartamella (2016) ranked
swearwords and insults perception, from less to most shocking, through an online
questionnaire: he divided swearwords in 4 categories (expletives, cazzo/“dick”;
insults, coglione/“asshole” [lit. ballocks]; curses vaffanculo/“go to hell/up the arse”;
obscene, culo/“arse”, and eschatological terms, merda/“shit”). This study, although
it employs a different methodology, is interesting for our purposes because it allows
us to position the swearwords present in our data on a “vulgarity” scale10.
     In interactional and CA studies, swearing has been associated with the
emotional and normative dimension made relevant by the participants (Butler and
Fitzgerald 2011; Hoey et al. 2021) and by the transgressive status of profanity to
which speakers orient to by suppressing or obscuring swearing (Schegloff 2003).


3. Methods and data

The corpus was collected by dr. Eleonora Sciubba within the project ALIAS (Archivio
di LInguA Spontanea), funded by KU Leuven (OWP2012/08). The data scrutinized

9 Tartamella (2016)’s investigation places cazzo as the most used swearword in Italian, while the
dictionary Il Nuovo De Mauro Online places it in the category FO “Fundamental lexicon”
https://dizionario.internazionale.it/parola/cazzo. This explains the fact that this word, although
referring to a specific part of the body, seems to be desemanticized in its various usages.
10 Contrary to Tartamella’s expectations, 84% of the proposed swearwords were deemed colorful

and irreverent, but not so offensive and shocking. Some scholars researching taboo and swearwords
have noticed that the use of swearwords in the Italian society is rather widespread (Galli de’ Paratesi
2009; Rossi 2011), thanks to the youth revolution in 1968 that lead also to the loosening of
censorship in the movie industry and the depenalization of swearwords in 1999
(https://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/99205l.htm). In the data presented here, this aspect seems
confirmed, as we see how participants themselves treat swearwords as acceptable and appropriate
to the context, by not sanctioning them or by recycling them.
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for our analysis consist of 10.5 hours of video recordings collected in institutional
(business meeting) and ordinary (dinner party) settings in Milano, documenting
spontaneous multiperson interactions (3‒5 participants), in everyday spoken
Italian. All participants have given their informed consent to the recording and
publication of the data in which they are visible. All proper names and sensitive
information have been pseudonymized The data have been transcribed following
Jefferson’s conventions (2004), and the original Italian transcripts translated into
English.
     We adopt Conversation Analysis, CA (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) and
Interactional Linguistics, IL (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018) as methods of
investigation. This means that we conduct a sequential analysis of turns-at-talk and
conceptualize syntax and grammatical resources as a practical matter, deployed by
the participants to achieve certain social actions. In doing so, we take an emic
approach to the data, analyzing the phenomena as they emerge from the
interactions and are made relevant by the participants through their actions, and
not as ad hoc categories. We follow previous research on emotions in CA, in line with
the idea that emotions are a central component of both the individual’s conduct and
the individual’s ways of interacting within society11. We focus on the visible
expression of emotions – looking at swearwords – as this presents some
systematicity and enables the participants to publicly display their understanding
of the co-participants’ social conduct.
     By using swearwords as entry points, we aim to explore how interactants
express negative emotions. Swearwords are a highly versatile resource in Italian
talk-in-interaction, as emerged already from ex.1. As grammatical resources, they
are used in the data as interjections (dio cane), nouns (cagate), modifiers (fottuto),
verb phrases (mi incazzo), fixed expressions, and sentences. At the level of turn-
management, swearwords can be found in turn-initial, mid-turn and turn-final
position; they can be part of a turn only or occupy an entire segment of a turn, a turn
constructional unit (TCU). Interactionally, they allow interactants to achieve a
variety of actions: teasing, finding an audience and fishing for affiliation,
complaining, reinforcing a (negative) stance, effectively implementing a directive
(cf. Sorjonen, Raevaara, and Couper-Kuhlen 2017).


4. Managing negative emotions through swearwords

We selected four excerpts representative of four instances that come from the
interplay of two dimensions in our data: 1. how the swearword is treated by the
participants; and 2. whether the target12 of the emotions expressed in the turn(s)
containing the swearword is inside or outside the constellation of present
participants.



11 Cf. Peräkylä and Ruusuvuori (2012: 65): “Although our basic understanding of emotion regulation
is different from the psychological, individual-centered view and the cultural view, we believe that
our findings complement rather than contradict these other approaches”.
12 We use the concept of target to refer to the person to whom the emotion veiculated by the

swearword is directed
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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                          D10


     1a. A swearword is used to reinforce the speaker’s stance together with other
elements (lexico-syntactical resources, facial expressions, changes in voice quality,
etc.), and it is treated as fishing for affiliation (exx. 2, 3, 1‒4);
     1b. A swearword emerges as the main resource to display an emotion, and it is
treated as a directive (ex. 2, 5);
     2a. The person the swearword is addressed to is outside the interaction, e.g., in
tellings (reported stories) and complaint sequences (exx. 2, 5);
     2b. The person the swearword is addressed to is present in the interaction
(friends in the dinner, co-workers in the meeting), e.g., in instruction sequences,
where the need for the recipient is ‘doing something’ other than just affiliating (exx.
3, 1‒4).
     Our data presents a variety of dimensions: from a jocular environment, where
swearwords are treated as teasing, and contribute to shared intersubjectivity, to the
work environment, where swearwords index a problematic negotiation of
intersubjectivity, a misalignment of perspectives. The presence or absence of the
target among the co-presents can play a role in the establishment of intersubjective
relationships.

4.1. Teasing, and expressing annoyance

Ex. 2 shows a case where the activity of teasing and the display of annoyance
contribute to create a shared jocular dimension among the ratified co-participants.
Dinner party: Piera (PIE) and Rino (RIN) have just arrived at Giulio (GIU)’s house to
find Giorgio (GIO) alone in the kitchen, chopping vegetables.
    The excerpt starts with a complaint turn by Rino: he utters the turn-entry device
ma/‘but’, moving from a previous topic to the next one, followed by the
demonstrative adjective quello/“that” (one), anaphorically referred to a “distant”
male referent, that, when used as personal pronoun in spoken Italian connotates
negatively the referent, because of the “distance” that it indexes (Villani 2010). The
verb construction that follows (rompere i coglioni/lit. “to break someone’s balls”)
indexes an animate entity, Giulio, the host (not present in the room yet), and is
delivered with emphasis on the profanity: the first syllable is stressed and the
swearword is pronounced with slowed prosody. The lexical choice of the
demonstrative, the swearword verb, and the reference to the exaggerated length of
time (l. 02, per tutta la giornata/“the whole day long”) serve the purpose of
delivering the complainable and conveying Rino’s negative stance: Giulio’s request
is perceived as unfair, since the person who made it is not present. Giorgio (ll. 04‒
05) treats Rino’s complaint as non-legitimate, disaffiliating from it. He uses an
indexical dai/“come on” that can be both backwards oriented – signaling
problematic talk – and forward oriented signaling the necessity to pursue a different
course of action, and to convey negative, disaffiliative stance toward a recipient
(Pauletto and Fatigante 2015). What follows at l. 07 is in fact an imperative verb, a




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partial recycling of the same verb construction without the swearword, lit. don’t




break, (don’t bother me) uttered with high volume, and orienting also to potential
complainable13. At ll. 09‒10, Rino produces an upgrade of his complaint in ll. 01‒02

13 MeanwhilePiera greets Giulio (l. 06), who has entered the kitchen, and asks him (l. 08) if the room
he came from is his, prefacing an imperative request to see it (l. 11) accepted by Giulio (l. 13).
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in response to Giorgio’s disaffiliative turn, raising the volume from the onset of the
turn. The dysphemism (un cazzo/“shit”/ lit. “a dick”, l. 10) ends the turn, making his
statement stronger and conveying his annoyance. At l. 14 Rino produces the reason
for his complaint: the food will take a long time to cook. Giorgio expresses
disagreement with mah, l. 15. At l. 18, the target of Rino’s complaint, Giulio, finally
orients to the complainer with the swear expression in high volume (almost
shouting) non rompere il cazzo te: he recycles previous expressions and lexical
items, non rompere and cazzo, allying with Giorgio. Rino smiles (not in the
transcript) and does not respond back, treating this turn as teasing and not as
confrontational. At l. 20 Giulio instructs Giorgio to go on with cooking, dismissing
Rino’s previous complaint (l. 14) as non-legitimate. Giorgio treats this instruction
literally, building a comic effect: he gestures throwing away the zucchinis as the verb
buttare means “to throw (away)”; but it can also mean throwing them in the pan, as
Giulio was suggesting. Through an embodied and verbal semantic shift, throw the
zucchini in the bin and not in the pan, Giorgio successfully manages to shift the
activity performed, from complaining to teasing, as also confirmed by Rino’s laugh
(l. 24).
     This episode shows a complicated intersubjective dimension: firstly, the
disagreements between Rino and Giorgio, and Rino and Giulio do not get resolved,
as they do not come to an agreement. Nonetheless, they switch from a complaint
dimension to a jocular one. Secondly, the swearwords are used to convey the
annoyance (or even anger) of the speakers (their affective stance), to emphasize
their disaffiliation, and to give directives. Nevertheless, the participants orient to
each other’s turns as teasing and building a comic effect, rather than as
confrontation or disagreement. Recycling similar swearwords and using the same
high volume ‘tone’ show the participants’ alignment toward the building of a shared
dimension, rather than a disjunctive one. Despite their display of negative emotions,
the participants’ usa of swearwords contributes to creating this jocular dimension,
where teasing is at the basis of the establishment of intersubjectivity.

4.2. Telling, and showing annoyance

In ex. 3 a participant talks about a person who is external to the interaction and has
an annoying behavior. The display of annoyance contributes to receiving affiliation
and attention from the co-participants and transforming the story into a laughable.
At dinner, Angela (ANG), Piera (PIE); Giulio (GIU), Giorgio (GIO), Rino (RIN) are
discussing the pros and cons of living together with other people. Giorgio brings as
an example his housemate’s “puzzling” behavior.
     The excerpt starts with Rino’s comment on Giorgio’s previous explanation of his
life with his flat mate. Rino displays affiliation, by suggesting that living with others
gets on your ‘nerves’, but Giorgio only partially agrees with this at l. 03, mitigating
Rino’s suggestion with sì^no/“yes no” and saying that only sometimes he gets
nervous. But in l. 04, with a contrastive però/“but”, Giorgio starts building up
annoyance: sometimes one just wants to say fuck you. At l. 06, he starts a complaint
against his flat mate who every morning leaves the bathroom window open. At l. 08,
Giorgio starts reproducing his morning ‘routine’: he wakes up and feels a fottuto/lit.
“fucked” (fucking) cold and then goes to shower. On the swearwords Piera and

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Angela laugh and Rino utters a continuer: Giorgio has ensured himself an audience.
Thus, he goes on l. 11 with higher volume and stress on the cause of his annoyance:
“it’s fucking cold”, with the swearword in the clear this time. At l. 12, Piera claims
understanding and affiliation by explicitly saying she understands him, and using
his name (in Italian both epistemic and emotional understanding are expressed with
the verb capire). But in overlap, l. 13 Giorgio starts a reenactment, using verbal,
embodied and prosodic resources (such as non-lexical vocalizations): DS14 allows
him to stage the conversation he has with himself, making his stance clear (Sidnell
2006) gaining him more co-participants’ laughter (ll. 14 and 16). At l. 17 with però
vabbè /“but well”, Giorgio shifts the topic back from himself to the housemate, and
starts an evaluation of his housemate’s behavior wondering whether his housemate
is purposedly set on annoying him or not (l. 18), using cazzo/“fuck” to reinforce this
contrast. After Angela’s agreement (l. 19), in ll. 20‒22, Giorgio continues his
storytelling explaining that his housemate comes back home all cheerful (again DS
is here used to convey the laid-back stance of the housemate, l. 21) which proves
that his housemate cannot be acting annoyingly on purpose (l. 22), starting his TCU
with cazzo at l. 21. At l. 23 Angela laughs displaying her attention, and Giorgio goes
on, wondering whether his housemate intentionally behaves like a stronzo/“piece
of shit”, bad. After a pause following the end of Giorgio’s reenactment, Rino self-
selects and starts assessing what has been said, closing the episode as it had started,
by using eh followed by a disjunctive particle (l. 01 and l. 26). Angela overlaps
interrupting him, recycling Giorgio’s swearword, cazzo, and stating that living with
other people is hard. By using the swearword she reinforces her negative
assessment, but she also achieves aligning and affiliation with Giorgio’s stance over
his storytelling.
     In this excerpt, multiple levels intersect from general to particular: on the one
side Giorgio and Rino are talking about cohabitation in general (l. 01 vivere
assieme/“living together”; l. 04 a volte/“sometimes”); on the other, Giorgio is
relating to a specific story about his housemate who has done specific things to
annoy him (e.g., leaving the bathroom window open15). Giorgio’s display of
annoyance seems to increase while the story progresses, from annoyance (l. 03) to
anger (ll. 13‒18): the swearwords are used in a crescendo, from vaffanculo to porca
troia, to cazzo repeated various times, while the cold is fottutto, reinforcing its
severity. In parallel, the story, which had started as a general complaint, becomes a
staged episode with an audience, reenacted through DS. Therefore, Giorgio ensures
the attention of an audience and a jocular shared dimension gets created, but he also
obtains affiliation and agreement as the target of the emotion display is external to
the present constellation of participants.




14 Günthner (2002:351) observes: “[d]irect quoting is always a stylized, theatrical device used for
dramatization that creates involvement and invites the recipient to display co-alignment and
indignation.”
15 In a previous sequence Giorgio had already told his friends how his housemate uses up all the warm

water in the boiler.
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D15                                                                        CALABRIA, SCIUBBA


4.3. Complaining, and displaying anger

Ex. 4 is an expansion of ex. 1, in that it occurs a few minutes earlier in the
conversation. Giulio is explaining why he is angry against someone external to the
interaction. Giulio (GIU) openly displays his anger and receives affiliation from
Giorgio (GIO).
      The excerpt starts with a sequence in which Giulio states openly that he is now
getting pissed: the verb incazzarsi derives from the word cazzo and is used to
express anger, as Rossi (2011) remarks. After an insertion sequence (ll. 03‒12),
Giorgio finally shows affiliation and alignment with Giulio, by starting his turn with
a cluster of turn-entry-devices that encode consequentiality e ma allora/“and but
then”, by providing a lexical ratification, and reusing Giulio’s dysphemism. Despite
having received affiliation from his co-participant, Giulio goes on with a post-other-
talk self-increment (Schegloff 1996; Calabria and De Stefani 2020), at l. 14 with the
relative pronoun che/“that” projecting a relative clause referred anaphorically back
to l. 09 “a guy”. If syntactically (three well-formed sentences) and pragmatically (a
three-part list) the turn at ll. 15‒16 is completed, prosodically it is not, and still
projects more to come. Giorgio self-selects at l. 17 in overlap with 16, with an
insulting question “does s/he suck dicks?”. Giorgio’s question explicitly shows the
speaker’s stance toward ‘the guy’, and consequently his affiliation toward Giulio. In
l. 18, Giulio starts an other-initiated repair as he could not hear Giorgio’s turn.
Giorgio repeats at l. 19 in the clear, resolving the first repair. At l. 20 Giulio starts
another repair (him?) to disambiguate whom Giorgio is referring to, since in l. 15,
Giulio had mentioned both him – the psychologist – and her – Angela. But Giulio does
not wait to hear the response, inferring that it is the psychologist who “sucks dicks”
not Angela, and ratifies Giorgio’s question, by repeating only the verb of the swear
expression ciucciare/“to suck (a dick)”.
      At l. 23 of ex. 1 (which chronologically directly follows ex. 4) Giulio, using an
and-prefaced continuation (Heritage and Sorjonen 1994), resumes the complaint
about Angela started as account at l. 04 (ex. 4), reenacting at ll. 23‒25 a constructed
dialogue (Tannen 1986) with one latent (Auer 2014) quotative. At l. 26, he utters eh
which projects a dispreferred continuation: this arrives with the disjunctive
conjunction però/“but” reinforced by the curse (dio cane/“goddammit”),
pronounced within the same intonation contour. The curse is a “strong”
swearword16, and it indexes Giulio’s stance: the emotion is built up in the preceding
turns, after a list-like series of recommendations (ll. 23‒24), and Angela’s
reassurance (l. 25), the curse is used at the climax of Giulio’s anger and it makes the
emotion explicit. In fact, in ll. 27‒31, using the 2nd pers. singular, he refers directly
to Angela while checking his phone. At l. 30, he confirms he has not received
anything with the exclamation eh, using an idiomatic expression consisting in a mild
dysphemism – una mazza ceppa di niente/“freaking nothing at all” – an intensifier
(Hoeksema and Napoli 2008; Napoli and Hoeksema 2009) that reinforces
niente/‘nothing’.

16 Swearwords against God (curses) are perceived as “volgarità altissima” (highest vulgarity)
according to the “volgarometro scale” devised by Tartamella (2016) through a 2009 survey, to
evaluate    Italian   people’s   perception     of   swear/taboo     words    and    insults:
https://www.parolacce.org/2009/05/16/abbiamo-il-volgarometro/
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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                                   D16




At l. 31 he verbalizes he is getting mad with the verb incazzarsi/“getting pissed”. In
these turns, we see how Giulio’s lexical choices index the negative emotion: from l.
28, where he uses an ortophemism (nulla/“nothing”), through l. 30 where he
reformulates the previous utterance adding a dysphemic17 intensifying double
expletive (una mazza ceppa/“freaking nothing”), followed by the climax in the

17See Allan and Burridge (2006) for a definition and discussion of “dysphemism”, “euphemism” and
“ortophemism”.
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D17                                                                  CALABRIA, SCIUBBA


following line (adesso m’incazzo/“now I’m getting pissed”), a strong swearword
(Tartamella 2016). At l. 33 Giorgio suggests that Giulio should get pissed only when
she arrives. By recycling the same verb, Gorgio seems to understand and validate
the rights of Giulio to get pissed and displays his affiliation with this. However, he
proposes a different timing, which is a delicate move, and Giulio, at l. 35, disagrees
as they will not be alone. L. 36 is a rhetorical question: stesse/“same” is pronounced
with stress and followed by the dysphemism cagate/“bullshit”, conveying Giulio’s
stance, and assessing Angela’s behavior as wrong. With the verb bisognare/lit. “to
need”, as a lexical deontic, Giulio disagrees with the necessity to repeat the same
behavior repeatedly.
     Similarly to the previous excerpt, in this case we find that the target of the
emotion is external. The anger is openly expressed with lexical means – together
with voice quality – using the verb incazzarsi at the beginning and upgrading it with
a curse word. This is treated as fishing for affiliation by Giorgio. Interestingly,




Giorgio displays alignment and affiliation not only by reusing the same swear
expression (incazzarsi) but also by categorizing negatively (through the swearword
multiword construction) the person he is treating as ‘the cause’ of Giulio’s anger.
Giulio, on the other hand, brings back the conversation to the complainable, the
target of his anger: Angela. In any case, Giulio as well reuses the same expression
suggested by Giorgio (ll. 17‒20 ex. 4): this shows that repeating or reusing the same
swearwords ratifies the emotion/stance conveyed more effectively, showing, and
reinforcing intersubjectivity.
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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                                          D18




4.4. Giving directives, and steaming off anger

The last excerpts18 are taken from a business meeting in a consultancy company
among the chairperson Paolo (PAO), and three managers, Annina (ANN), Duilio
(DUI) and Mario (MAR). Paolo’s display of anger toward the co-participants (his
employees) is treated as a directive (Sorjonen, Raevaara, and Couper-Kuhlen 2017).
Before the beginning of this excerpt, they were discussing personnel’s tasks within
the company, but they cannot reach an agreement. They have a database called CRM
to store this information, but it is not clear whose responsibility it is to keep it
updated and running.
    At ll. 01‒02 Paolo tells Annina, who is responsible for the commercial sector,
that she should manage the database. This is treated as a problematic statement:
Annina does not reply and a long pause (2.1) follows. At ll. 04‒06, Paolo restates the




reason Annina should be in charge of CRM but this time he places a turn-initial eh
cazzo/“INTER.fuck” continuing his turn with high pitch and volume. The turn-initial
swearword, the change in voice tone, and the presence of pauses, at ll. 4‒5, are all
indications that Paolo has started displaying annoyance about the management of
the situation. At l. 06, he gives Annina directives. Another long pause (2.4) follows l.
07, but this time at l. 08 Annina accepts Paolo’s directives, giving the preferred
answer vabèn/“okay”. Despite her vocal agreement, she displays the problematic
nature of this acceptance with her body conduct (gaze aversion) and voice tone (low
voice).
    Between minutes 26:31 and 27:31 (not in the transcript), Paolo explains the
details of her work, but Annina disagrees. She perceives Paolo’s directives as a
punishment against her personally, and displays anger too, only by raising her voice
tone, without swearing. Between 27:32 and 28:54 (not in the transcript), Annina
explains that performing this task is absurd for her, as beyond her scope, but Paolo
18To make the analysis easier to follow, a long excerpt has been split in four parts. Some lines in the
transcript have been omitted and summarized when relevant for the rest of the analysis.
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D19                                                                     CALABRIA, SCIUBBA


insists that it falls under her commercial responsibility. He is the boss thus she has
to accept his instructions, despite disagreeing. Paolo increasingly displays his
impatience and annoyance: contrary to before, he will not move on in the meeting
agenda until this problem is settled.




From l. 77, with an increase in volume, Paolo accounts (with because) for changing
his mind about this topic, by scolding off his employees like children, using the verb
‘to play’: they are throwing at each other the database responsibility as a ‘hot potato’.
As Paolo’s TCUs progress, and so does the display of anger, he seems not to control
his register anymore, using colloquialisms (e.g., ci siamo incartati l. 68; venirne fuori
l. 69; finché non ne usciamo ll. 70‒71; non mi schiodo l. 76); high volume and pitch;
and uttering the turn with pauses and restarts, which signal the problematic
progression of the talk, climaxed at l. 79 with the exclamation eh

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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                           D20


cazzo/“INTER.fuck”. His turn is potentially complete at l. 80 and a pause follows (1.
81). At l. 82, Duilio orients to Paolo’s talk as an urgent request to act and volunteers
to become the owner of the CRM, also showing his treatment of Paolo’s previous
turns (from l. 79) as a display of anger. Between ll. 84‒88 Paolo gives instructions
to Duilio (who nods) about what is expected from him, lexicalizing explicitly his
anger by saying he would become punitive if instructions were not followed (ll. 87‒
88). There is no uptake, another long pause (4.4) follows (l. 89), while the co-
participants keep their eyes on the table: Paolo is entitled to this punitive attitude,
as he is the boss. At l. 90 he asks for confirmation, but again nobody replies (l. 91 a
long pause ensues, 1.6). Therefore at l. 92 he says that playing is useless for the
company, reinforcing this at l. 93, with a swearword construction: games break balls
(rompono i coglioni). Ll. 92‒94 show again how Paolo displays, through
colloquialisms and the usage of swearwords, his anger. Another long pause follows
(2.1) at l. 95. Then Paolo gives instructions to Duilio (not in the transcript). Paolo
keeps giving instructions and directives, stressing the key points at l. 102, and from
l. 103 he openly displays his exasperation (he spreads his arms wide and increases
his volume). At ll. 106‒109 he accounts for his frustration by saying that since they
started CRM there have been people who have not said shit (un cazzo, l. 108) to him.
The dysphemism, un cazzo, uttered in high volume, conveys the problematic gravity
of something that is expected but not happening, communicating with the boss,
which intensifies Paolo’s annoyance. At ll. 108‒109 he closes the topic (adesso




basta/“now stop”), uttering the turn with final intonation and averting his gaze to
signal the end of the activity (Rossano and Stivers 2010). Between minutes 30:57‒
31:20 (not in the transcript), Annina agrees with Paolo, however he is now angry,
and restates again, shouting, that they need to find an owner of CRM. Annina replies
that they have found Duilio.


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D21                                                                  CALABRIA, SCIUBBA




At l. 121, Paolo needs to make sure they understood, because, as he ironically
explains, they are not living in a magical world: (l. 122). He uses again uncontrolled
register as he displays his stepping out of the work zone using lexicon and
references that do not belong to the finance and business domains (Harry Potter, l.
122). With oh cazzo/“oh fuck”, l. 125, Paolo expresses a change-of-state: now it
should be clear what he excepts them to do. At l. 126 he reports some possible
objections, using colloquialisms, such as a raghi/“hey guys”, displaying again
uncontrolled vocabulary and the stepping out of the working talk and role. In the
omitted part, he invites his co-participants to move on. However, he needs to check
that everyone is on board, so he gazes at Mario who was not involved in this
conversation until now. Mario confirms his understanding with a superlative and
the sequence is now closed
     In this complex excerpt, we see a different setting from the jocular shared
dimension of the dinner, where following instructions is more relevant than
displaying affiliation. Compared to previous excerpts, the establishment of
intersubjectivity is made complicated by the setting itself: the roles of the
interactants in the company give them different deontic rights, which not only
means they cannot directly disagree with a superior, but also that only one
participant, the boss Paolo, is entitled to his anger, as this emotional display is
deployed to ensure the progression of the meeting and to solve a practical issue
within the company. Here the targets of the emotions – anger, impatience,
exasperation – are inside the interaction: namely, they are in an asymmetric
situation (cf. Sorjonen, Raevaara and Couper-Kuhlen 2017) as employees. This

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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                                         D22


asymmetry is oriented to by participants in different places throughout the
interaction. Paolo uses his deontic rights as boss to contrast Annina’s disagreement
and to give urgent directives. He does so in an effective way (as we see by Annina’s
attempts at mitigating, Duilio’s offer of acting, and Mario’s superlative affirmative
response), by mobilizing many resources: body conduct, volume and voice quality,
prosodic clues, lexical choices (e.g., colloquial register and swearwords).


5. Discussion and conclusions

In this article we set out to explore, through the means of IL and CA, how interactants
mobilized in situ swearwords to display and manage negative emotions and
accomplish specific social actions. As we can see in table 1 a variety of actions can
be implemented by using a swearword in a turn, confirming the flexibility of these
resources in Italian.
     The interactants, by using swearwords, can implement a directive (non
rompere, non rompere il cazzo; incazzati); display a negative attitude toward a
target (m’ha rotto i coglioni; li ciuccia i cazzi?; ciuccerà il mio); intensify a negative
statement19 with an expletive (freddo fottuto; una mazza ceppa di niente; non mi
dice un cazzo; non ha ancora preparato un cazzo; i giochini rompono i coglioni; fa lo
stronzo; le stesse cagate); orient toward the definitive closing of previous talk (oh
cazzo); display the incremental climax of an emotion (porco dio; vaffanculo; eh
cazzo; porca troia). Also co-participants can use swearwords in response to these
actions: in showing affiliation with the person displaying the negative emotions in
exx. 3-4, or in response to the teasing ex. 2, co-participants recycle the same, or
partially the same, swearword or turn containing one. This reusage suggests the
achievement of a convergence of stances.
     The dimensions of disappointment and complaint are transversal to these
actions as they are transversal to the macro-activities implemented in the excerpts.
We observe:

     the deployment of swearwords in the making of a jocular dimension, where
teasing and responding with an insult, or a directive in a multiword verb
construction, create the base for a shared intersubjectivity (ex. 2);
     the deployment of swearwords within reported speech, to reenact an
external person in a story telling environment, secure an audience and affiliative
displays from co-participants (ex. 3);
     strong curses in complaint sequences displaying the escalation of anger and
ensuring affiliation, as well as the convergence of a negative stance toward the same
target (ex. 1‒4);
     in the delicate work environment, swearwords as index of a problematic
negotiation of intersubjectivity (a misalignment of perspectives and a difficulty in
achieving mutual understating), and effective means to give a directive and convey
the urgency to act (ex. 5).



19   We also have a case of swearword figata in ex. 2 where the assessment in instead positive.
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D23                                                                       CALABRIA, SCIUBBA




The outsideness or insideness of the target person can determine what is relevant
next in the turn-by-turn unfolding of the interaction: in the case in which the target
is external, affiliating is the relevant next action (exx. 3, 1, 4), the interaction is less
disrupted and the complaint can go on and the speaker build up even more anger
(ex. 1); when the target is internal (exx. 2, 5) the response to the emotion a) can be
immediate and disrupt the progressivity of the interaction (ex. 2); b) or what is
relevant next is the urgency to act (ex. 5). Moreover, when it is internal there are
other prosodic cues, e.g. shouting, that display the escalation of the emotion; while
when external, the lexical choice, the dysphemism, has a more prominent role.

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SWEARWORDS IN INTERACTION                                                             D24


     If previous CA studies have documented how speakers orient to the
transgressive status of profanity (Schegloff 2003) and the normative restrictions on
swearing (Butler and Fitzgerald 2011), the data presented in this study shows that
improprieties can also concur to creating intimacy (Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff
1987) and positive emotional experiences, such as humor (Beers Fägersten and
Stapleton 2017). Swearwords in our excerpts contribute to building a mechanism of
“social swearing” (exx. 2, 3) creating humor, expressing solidarity, and emotions, as
opposed to “annoyance swearing” (exx. 4, 5) cathartically releasing them (Montagu
1967; Beers Fägersten and Stapleton 2017). Whether expletives, dysphemism, or
curses, swearwords in this study are not accounted nor repaired even in the
business meeting20. They are treated as not breaching the normative constraints of
the interaction (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1981). They are also not treated as
speaking issues needing repair (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). In the overall
corpus, however, this dimension is present and oriented to by the participants, who
sanction and make relevant the problematic aspects of swearwords. Jefferson, Sacks
and Schegloff (1987: 160) acknowledge the relevance of context for the production
and treatment of “frankness, rudeness, crudeness, profanity, obscenity, etc., [which]
are indices of relaxed, unguarded, spontaneous, i.e. intimate interaction”. In
conclusion, as they are used and made relevant in the unfolding of turns,
swearwords acquire a public dimension in interaction. They contribute to the
achievement of specific social actions and therefore to the building of
intersubjectivity, a shared understanding of the situation. By using swearwords in
the management and display of their emotions, participants make these emotions
visible, public, too (cf. Peräkylä and Sorjonen 2012). Hence, the emotions cease to
be only an internal process and become a social phenomenon.


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