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CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter reviews some related literature to support this research. There are two main points that will be discussed in this chapter. The first point is about
theoretical description in which provides theories and previous studies relevant to the topic. The second point is the theoretical framework which summarizes and
synthesizes all major relevant theories. This section will help the researcher
conduct the study to solve the problems.
A. Theoretical Description
This point will elaborate the basic concept of swear words and some related topics before going further to analyze the problem formulation.
1. Language and Society
Language is fundamental to social interaction in all societies. The relationship between language and society is intertwined. It cannot be denied that
the existence of language cannot be separated from society. We can study this phenomenon as a part of sociolinguistics field. It is reinforced by Trudgill 2000
who says that ―sociolinguistics is a part of linguistics which is concerned with
language as social and cultural phenomenon ‖ p. 32. Holmes 2013 adds:
10 There is a relationship between language and society because
sociolinguistics examines the way people use language in different social contexts and the use of language to convey messages. As language that is
functioned to convey messages, there must be social interactions among the members of community. Those social interactions can indicate the
relationship of the people who are involved in it p. 1. In addition, the way people use language in different social contexts
produces different dialects and this will be different for different layers of society. The different layers of the society include age, gender, social class, ethnicity, and
cultural groups Baron, 2005; Howe, 2012. Furthermore, as stated by Mesthrie et al. 2000,
―language does not only deliver meaning or ideas of certain events or entities, but also i
ndicates the speaker‘s social group background, such as social class, status, origin, gender, age group, etc.
‖ p. 6. In this case, they emphasize that speech features can be a way to identify someone‘s social group to which he
or she belongs, a brief description of the group, and the lifestyle he or she is associated with.
Being more specific, every speech feature that comes from a certain speaker can be judged by the listeners
for identifying the speaker‘s status or affiliation. This judgment leads to the emergence of attitude towards the style of speech
uttered by a certain person of a particular group of society. People are capable to automatically give value to the language variety they hear. Moreover, Whorf says
―different societies may value certain things and do them in a certain way, yet almost all of the societies that exist in this world have the same requirements of
the categorization of good and bad language‖ as cited in Wardhaugh , 2006, p. 221. In addition, Wardhaugh reinforces:
11 Good language is usually measured when someone speaks properly and
politely in the context. Good language must contain dense meaning which is shown in beautiful and sweet words. On the other hand, bad language is
considered to be non-standard and wrongly used, which is sometime resulting in annoyance for the other person who hears it p. 222.
Besides, Jay 2000 classifies taboo words also as bad language p. 10.
From the explanation above, it can be said that language and society have relationship and influence on how language is used. Language can be reflected in
the language of a society. Moreover, the values that arise in a society also influence how they distinguish what is considered as good or bad things as seen in
language. There are good and bad languages including taboo words. Different society also has different vocabularies to address the bad languages including the
taboo words and swear words. Therefore, here the researcher will discuss further the bad languages in English society as portrayed in 12 Years a Slave movie.
2. The Concept of Swear Words
