Abstract
This paper approaches young women’s speaking style by analysing the ways in which the interjection joder is employed in interactions in Spanish and Galician among young females. The analysis identifies several uses of this form at the interactional and discursive level: reinforcement of speech acts, marker of disagreement, marker of complaints, expression of minimal emotional assessments, correcting and stalling. It is concluded that joder has developed multiple functions in interaction as a discursive marker, in contrast to arguments against the inclusion of interjections in this pragmatic category. The findings also suggest that this expletive fulfils a sociolinguistic function as a marker of ‘young femininities’, since it demonstrates how it has been integrated into young women’s speaking style, in contrast to traditional gender rules and broader descriptions of ‘women’s talk’ in Language and Gender studies.
Highlights
This paper approaches young women’s speaking style by analysing how the Spanish word joder is used in interactions among female speakers in their early 20’s
The findings suggest that this expletive fulfils a sociolinguistic function as a marker of ‘young femininities’, since it demonstrates how it has been integrated into young women’s speaking style, in contrast to traditional gender rules and broader descriptions of ‘women’s talk’ in Language and Gender studies
The analysis given in this paper demonstrates that joder has developed multiple functions in interaction that are derived and/or linked to its primary use as a ‘vulgar’ interjection to express the speaker’s feelings
Summary
This paper approaches young women’s speaking style by analysing how the Spanish word joder is used in interactions among female speakers in their early 20’s. While he argues for the inclusion of at least some interjections in this category, other researchers generally exclude them, arguing that they only serve the discursive function that corresponds to their grammatical class, such as the expression of feelings (Borreguero Zuloaga, 2015) This assumption could explain that corpus-based research on Spanish and English colloquial conversation has not paid much attention to expletives as discourse markers (Briz, 1998; Briz et al, 2008; Stenström, 2014) or that approaches to them are taken from a predominantly quantitative perspective (Murphy, 2009; Stenström, 2006, 2014), which results in an oversimplified picture of their functional properties. A second aim of this paper is to apply a gender perspective to the analysis of this form in young women’s friendly interactions, taking as a premise that expletives are stereotypically linked to men and masculinity, as sociocultural restrictions on their use have been traditionally much more severe for women in different languages and cultures (Coates, 2004; Lakoff, 1975/2004; Lozano Domingo, 1995). The reasons for this balance could have much to do with the fact that joder is used for more discursive and interactional functions than those differentiated in this study, in contrast to its grammatical invariability, as I aim to demonstrate
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