Date of Award

8-1-2016

Thesis Type

masters

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

language

Department

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Institution

University of Malaya

Abstract

The f-word is a popular swear word used on social media and it is used in different forms and functions. This study investigates the uses of the f-word on a social media platform, Twitter. This study was carried out to address the following questions: (1) What are the syntactic forms of the f-word found on Twitter? (2) What are the functions of the f-word on Twitter? (3) What are the differences and similarities of the findings of this study with McEnery and Xiao’s (2004) study of the f-word in the British National Corpus (BNC)? The data comprised a corpus of 12,000-word from Twitter. Holster’s (2005) classification was used in this study to examine the syntactic forms of the f-word. This study employed McEnery et al. (2000) and Ljung (2011) typologies to analyze the functions of the f-word. The findings showed that the f-word is highly used as a verb, and it is used mainly to curse on Twitter. The results obtained in this study show some similarities to McEnery and Xiao’s (2004 findings in the BNC.

Additional Information

Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, 2016.

Download

Share

COinS