Taboo lexeme conditioning and obscenities in American English【翻译】

本文探讨了禁忌词汇在神经学、心理学和社会学层面的条件作用，特别是在母语者习得过程中对待某些词汇作为高度禁忌的条件。禁忌词汇在情感和道德处理结构中表现出高活动性，独立于命题语言处理，受到强烈负面情绪反应，并通过社会规范和法律审查进行抑制。

Abstract
Taboo Lexeme Conditioning refers to the neurological, psychological, and
sociological conditioning required during lexical acquisition for a native speaker to treat or
experience certain lexemes as highly taboo. Taboo words differentiate both neurologically
from non-emotional or non-taboo lexemes, and lexically person to person, in at least 4 ways:
1) they exhibit high activity in the emotional and moral processing structures of the limbic
system, and can activate, or be uttered, independently of cortical structures involved in
propositional language processing; 2) they generally receive a high amount of negative
emotional response during lexical acquisition and subsequent usage, which affects how they
are processed and encoded by the brain; 3) they are consistently suppressed through social
mores, religious or legal censorship, persecution and/or prosecution; 4) they violate a
morality code by means of taboo and describe the most potent taboos of a culture. American
English Obscenities meet all of these criterion: 1) they exhibit independent, nonpropositional
limbic activation, as seen in brain imaging of patients with neurological
damage or disorders; 2) they receive highly negative emotional responses from people who
find them offensive morally and socially, which influences neurological encoding during
lexical acquisition; 3) they have been subjected to censorship by American Church and State,
deriving from an English legal system censoring profanities and blasphemies, each
consistently influenced by Puritan interests; and 4) they violate linguistic taboos, which
evolve from two much older taboos in Judeo-Christianity: taboos against the body and taboos
against anti-religious or deity invoking language. The rise of the secular West sapped
TABOO LEXEME CONDITIONING iv
religious profanities, blasphemies, and oaths of their emotional power, but taboos of and
negative attitudes towards the body remained, and obscenity filled that emotional void left by
profanity. Today we are left with a unique class of lexemes in American English that came
about only through a very specific progression, and repression, of attitudes towards the body
and the power of language.
TABOO LEXEME CONDITIONING v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................ii
Abstract.....................................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures...........................................................................................................................vi
Chapter 1: Introduction..............................................................................................................1
The N of NPS.................................................................................................................3
The P of NPS..................................................................................................................5
The S of NPS..................................................................................................................6
Purpose of the Thesis.................................................................................................................8
Hypotheses.................................................................................................................................9
Background on Obscenities.....................................................................................................14
Chapter 2: The Limbic System and Neurolinguistics of Swearing..........................................18
Chapter 3: Disgust, Emotional Conditioning, and Morality....................................................33
Chapter 4: The Sacred, Profane, and Christianity....................................................................46
Chapter 5: Linguistic Censorship by Church, Crown, and Law..............................................64
Part I: England.............................................................................................................66
Part II: America...........................................................................................................79
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................95
References..............................................................................................................................108
List of Terms..........................................................................................................................118
TABOO LEXEME CONDITIONING vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Linguistic Origins of English Obscenities...................................................................15
2 Earliest Evidence of English Obscenities....................................................................15