Psychological Motives Motives of Swearing

44 Code: Science Violence 3 Jack Gladstone, why does Zarpedon still have control over Helios’s defenses? We shut down the jamming signal on Elpis -- the Vault Hunters shouldn’t even have to be saving your asses right now just so you can lower the shields. No offense. Gladstone Uh, Zarpeon mught have a weaker signal jammer on her person. She could have another mole on Helios, like the Meriff. OR she probably just manually rewired the security system-- Jack --Waitwaitwait. There might be another traitor on Helios? Gladstone That’s only one possibility, I -- Jack, you there? The conversation above happened between Jack and his subordinate, Gladstone. In that case, Jack was confused about why did Zarpedon, his enemy, still had control over the defense system of space station. He then mentioned that Gladstone and his other partners had once ever been saved by the Vault Hunter from the danger. In this situation, Jack was trying to use playful term “asses” which referred to the Gladstone and his partner’s life. He did that because he wanted to lower the tense in that conversation by playfully using the swearing utterance. Furthermore, he was also stated that he did not plan to offense them.

4.1.2.3 Linguistic Motives

In some condition, Jack would likely to express his feeling or emotion by using swearing expression was because he just wanted to do that. In other words, Jack was motivated to do swearing because it was basically his habit and it was his preference action in verbally expressing his feeling. 45 The first example was about the situation where Jack was using certain swearing expression because it was his way of speaking in referring something he did not like. Code: Wiping the Slate 6 Jack The old movin’ bookcase, huh? The guy was a walking frickin’ cliché. Nobody puts stuff behind bookcase anymore -- who even has books? Let’s have some fun and see what else our bull-shoveling pal had to say for himself -- play it The conversation above occurred between Jack and the Vault Hunter. The Vault Hunter was previously asked by Jack to find hidden recordings in the Meriff’s office. They then found out that one of the recordings was stored behind a moving bookcase. In this case, Jack claimed that the Merrif was a walking cliché. However, he decided to use swear word “frickin’” because he wanted to add that. He was motivated to do that because it was his habit to add some swear word before the other word in order to spice up something that he did not like. In the second example, Jack was motivated to do swearing because he wanted to do that in order to mention something he liked: Code: Science and Violence 2 Jack Doc Grayson’s working on some cloaking tech I wanna start using on Hyperion snipers when it’s 46 done. Just imagine it -- they take position, turn invisible, and then pfftbtbh Bad guys literally have NO idea what hit them I mean, y’know, they’re probably gonna assume it was a bullet because there’ll be a bullet hole in them, but whatever, it’s frickin’ awesome This conversation happened when Jack was explaining Doctor Grayson’s project to the Vault Hunter. He explained that Doctor Grayson would make him a cloaking device which could make him went invisible. Furthermore, Jack explained that he could shoot somebody while he was invisible. In this condition, he was then motivated to do swearing in order to indicate something he liked, which was the cloaking device. In his swearing “it’s frickin’ awesome”, it contained the swear word “frickin’” because he wanted to add that. He was motivated to do that because it was his habit to add some swear word before the other word in order to spice up something that he liked.

4.2 Research Discussion

In this part, I would provide some discussions to answer the two research questions based on the findings. The discussions were divided into two parts. The first discussion was talking about the types of swearing that were used by Jack. The next discussion covers the motives of Jack to do swearing in his conversation with the other character throughout the game. There would be some expert theories that could support the discussions.