In this assignment you are laying the groundwork for your literature review in your research article. 

Locate five articles (or book chapter or research thesis) from the recent applied linguistics literature that are directly germane to your chosen research question.  Write an extended summary (about 500 words) for each article, identifying (as always) the main question and answer, but going into considerable detail about what evidence the author uses to defend their answer, and how that evidence is interpreted.

Use the following model as your guide (but generate five of them).

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Bibliographic Info:    Brown, Kate E & Kushner, Howard I.  "Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing," New Literary History, 32: 537-562, 2001.

Question: What is the common element of cursing in coprolalia, malediction and poetry?

Answer: Cursing is considered both a breach of communicative propriety and a signal of linguistic non-fluency.  However, these three forms of cursing, coprolalia, malediction, and comedic routines all show how cursing is a form of interruption: both breaking convention and following convention. While cursing articulates sound into meaning of a certain kind, it fails to communicate thoughts so much as make (or break) social bonds.

Entry point: According to the theory of ‘voice’ created by Jacques Derrida and expanded by Mladen Dolar, speech is argued to be a “vehicle of thought,” but actual evidence contradicts this claim. 

Evidence:  Coprolalia is a condition most often associated with Tourrette Syndrome. Though the interruptions entail the utterance of normal curse words, these interruptions do disrupt the normal patterns of speech. They seem to come from a different part of the brain: the timbre of voice is different and the eruption occurs at grammatical interstices. This phenomenon is best described as a vocalization rather than speech, because it appears to be a purely physiological impulse rather than a volitional and meaningful communication. Those who experience this syndrome often can anticipate and sometimes even deflect the interruption for a brief period, but not completely stop it. What is interesting is that coprolalia does follow some linguistic conventions: the words are recognizable, offensive, show cultural affiliation, and even specific situational awareness.
     Coprolalia shows the vocalizations are not “vehicles of thought” but rather physiological responses from some form of brain damage. This helps show that cursing relies on non-linguistic functions of the brain. Of particular interest is this statement, “Some researches have found lower incidences of coprolalia among Japanese with TS than among Europeans and North Americans. Others have noted, however, that coprolalia in Japan often takes the form of a change in the tone and pitch of voice that is no less culturally inappropriate and obscene than cursing in other cultures.” Indicting that Japanese cursing does not rely on specific lexical words, but also variations of phonology, and prosody. Further research of their sources will be interesting. Malediction and comedic cursing are fully under control of the speaker and only resemble coprolalia in that they violate the theory of voice/thought.  Malediction is the formal cursing found in literature, two prime examples used in the text both come from Shakespeare. Basically malediction is a speech act where vengeance is taken by causing future harm. The authors find this interesting because of the time lag from when the cursing takes place to when it actually happens. This is related to coprolalia, because the speaker of the speech-act does not have the ‘voice’ to actually fulfill the curse. Thus a different ‘voice’ is required to fulfill the act and it is this ‘voice’ that actually performs the act of cursing. The relationship of a different ‘voice’ is also seen comedic cursing, though in my opinion this somewhat tenuous, and not fully shown in the article. The comedian appears to be retelling the curses, profanity in all cited cases, so also uses a different ‘voice.’