AN ANALYSIS OF PROFANITY WORDS FOUND IN BREAKING BAD SERIES: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the profanity words found in Breaking Bad Series. Swear words are considered taboo in the society despite of its existence in languages to express anger and some of them are used to show solidarity in certain groups. This study aimed to answer two research questions, which are “What category of profanity found most frequently in Breaking Bad series?” and secondly, “What functions of profanity found most frequently in Breaking Bad series?” The category of profanity refers to the type of the profanity that is used while function refers to the intention of its usage. All of the episodes from the first and second season of the show were the subjects of this study and the data were the swear words found in each episode. The data were in the form of words that were uttered or displayed in the series. In order to obtain the data, the researchers watched each episode one by one from each series, input the swear words in the table that had been made and counted their occurrence and grouped their category and functions. The researchers used 12 categories of swear words. The category of swear words refers to the words uttered by the swearers, the kind of words used by the characters The researchers used 12 categories of swear words, which are sexual relation, religion, excrement, death, animal name mentioning, physically or mentally disabled, prostitution, ethnic, racial or gender slurs, ancestral allusions, substandard vulgar terms, offensive slangs, and narcotics or crime. The researchers adopted the theories of profanity category from Andersson (1985). The function of profanity refers to the intention or motive of the swearers to utter the words. In this case, the researchers used five types of function, which were dysphemistic, idiomatic, abusive emphatic, and cathartic swearing. The theory of profanity types of function was adopted from Pinker (2010). The study resulted in religion as the most frequently found category (186 data) and idiomatic swearing as the most frequently found function of profanity (173 data).