Insults and Swear Words in the TinTin Comic

Abstract

Linguists consider insults/swear words as interjections carrying an expressive, cathartic, function, through which the enunciator manifests emotions. We provide a contrastive study of insults/swear words, investigating whether there are specific morphological/syntactic structures pertaining to insults/swear words and discuss the cross-cultural similarities/differences in the pragmatic use of this kind of language, focusing on the perspective of politeness. To do so, we analyse examples drawn from Hergé’s TinTin and their translation into Greek and English, this comic being rich in insults /swear words due to the particularities of the genre of discourse and Captain Haddock’s expressive character. The question is whether the implicit pragmatic/cultural values are the same in all the texts or there are important differences, which can be traced, deriving from the particularities of each of the languages of study. It emerged that the Greek chosen utterances reflect all the parameters influencing the original: phonological, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic. The English version seems to be more distant on all levels of analysis. The (non)preservation of the parameters depends on the peculiarities of the Greek, French and English languages and on the collective images of the recipients. Our conclusions match previous researches, proving Greek as positive politeness oriented, opposed to English (see also Romero 2000; Sifianou 2001).

Keywords

• insults
• swear words
• pragmatics
• morphology
• linguistic politeness
• cultural values