"Oh my goodness!" A corpus investigation of euphemisms from a sociolinguistic perspective

Abstract

The present thesis is a corpus-based study of euphemisms from a sociolinguistic perspective. The study is an attempt to reveal if there are any differences in the usage of the euphemisms gee, heavens, gosh, flaming, blasted, blooming, crikey, blimey, Oh my goodness, sugar, heck and darn by male and female speakers of English with other variables such as age and social class. According to McEnery s (2006) study on swearwords, women swear just as much as men, but men have a tendency to use stronger swearwords than women. The aim of the thesis is to answer the following research questions: 1. Do women use euphemistic swearing more often than men and are there different euphemisms favored by male and female speakers? 2. Do people from the upper class use euphemistic swearing more than people from the working class? Are certain euphemisms favored by one social class more than the others? 3. Is there a similar pattern for the age groups and are certain euphemisms favored by one group more than the others? The results from the British National Corpus (BNC) show that there are indeed differences between factors such as gender, social class and age. There is no obvious tendency as to which social class use euphemisms more than the others as each group seem to prefer different euphemisms. Findings also prove that women use euphemisms slightly more than men, but there are, however, no signs of women overusing euphemistic counterparts of strong swearwords. The results suggest that there is less of a correlation between the use of swearwords and euphemisms.