Abstract
Swear-words tend to be insufficiently described in Czech dictionaries. The reason is that these linguistics devices are taboo, their meaning is often vague and strongly influenced by the speaker''s idiolect.
Moreover, it is hardly possible to objectively measure their expressive strength. Nevertheless, this paper provides a classification of selected swear-words based on a questionnaire survey.
To describe the selected swear-words (blbeček, blázen, blbec, blb, pitomec, kráva, vůl, debil, prdel, hovno, kurva, píča, čurák), author''s corpora comprising the work of Karel Capek and Bohumil Hrabal were used. The results were then compared with the corpus of spontaneous spoken language ORAL2008.
This comparison enables us to examine the changing frequency of usage of the individual swear-words in time. The language of Karel Capek represents the first time period, the language of Bohumil Hrabal belongs to the second time period and ORAL2008 represents the third time period.
Moreover, since ORAL2008 is sociolinguistically balanced, it is also possible to analyse the usage in the following categories: gender, age and education of participants. Sentence structures and phrasemes, in which the swear-words are used, also provide an interesting source of information.
The increasing frequency of particular swear-words is not caused by the fact that language is becoming ruder, as some speakers think, but may rather be the result of the swear-words becoming semantically empty, e.g. in the case of the swear-word vůl. In the paper we also try to show the process of euphemisation of swear-words on the example of the words hovno and prdel.