Once in a Season – The Pragmatic Function of Fuck in “BoJack Horseman” TV Show

Abstract

This article investigates the use and pragmatic functions of the swear word fuck in the “BoJack Horseman” produced by Netflix and bridges the gap in the linguistic research on this particular TV show. Incorporating corpus linguistics tools, the BoJack Horseman Corpus was compiled and the lemma fuck has been investigated and analysed from the multimodal perspective. It occurs six times, just once per every season of the show, every time when the interlocutor expresses strong emotions, usually towards the eponymous character. The use of a swear word provides a vent for anger, disappointment, or surprise and creates an extralinguistic narrative frame, due to its economic use by the writers of the show.

Keywords

• fuck
• swearing
• swear words
• foul language
• corpus studies
• pragmatic analysis
• tv shows
• bojack horseman
• telecinematic discourse
• netflix