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Factors influencing the use of obscene vocabulary in the Russian language (on the material of the youth speech corpus)

1) Chepovetskaya Sofiia Vadimovna 2) Melkozerova Valeriia Igorevna 3) Sherstinova Tatiana Yurievna

1) Research Assistant at Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” – Saint-Petersburg, Laboratory Researcher at Research Institute for Official Language Problems, Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia, Saint-Petersburg, avchepovetskaya@edu.hse.ru 2) Research Assistant at Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” – Saint-Petersburg, Russia, Saint-Petersburg, vimelkozerova@edu.hse.ru 3) PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Philology and Academic Director of the Philology educational program, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” – Saint-Petersburg, Russia, Saint-Petersburg, tsherstinova@hse.ru

Abstract

The paper considers the influence of extra-linguistic factors, such as socio-psychological characteristics of informants and the features of communicative situa-tions, on the frequency of their use of obscene language in oral communication. The empirical material was accumulated from a corpus of oral speech transcripts, con-taining 286 662 words. The study showed that the scale of obscenities used and the score obtained by an informant on the scale “emotional instability” are characterized by a moderate inverse relationship, while the frequency of the obscene vocabulary used depend on the type of communicative situation and decreases when the social distance between the participants of the speech act increases.

Keywords

oral discourse; obscene vocabulary; correlation analysis; Russian profanity; speech situation.

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For citing: Chepovetskaya S.V., Melkozerova V.I., Sherstinova T.Y. (2025) Factors influencing the use of obscene vocabulary in the Russian language (on the material of the youth speech corpus). Ethnopsycholinguistics. Moscow. INION RAN.Vol. 2 (21). pp. 110-122. DOI: 10.31249/epl/2025.02.07


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