TY - JOUR AU - Legroski, Marina Chiara PY - 2018/10/17 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Offensiveness scale: how offensive is this expression? JF - Estudos Linguísticos (São Paulo. 1978) JA - Estudos Linguisticos VL - 47 IS - 1 SE - Pragmática DO - 10.21165/el.v47i1.1958 UR - https://revistas.gel.org.br/estudos-linguisticos/article/view/1958 SP - 169-180 AB - In order to determine if offensiveness was a necessary trait to characterize certain expression as a swear word by the speakers, this paper presents a pilot experiment designed for this purpose. Based on the statistical analysis of the data, we show that these two concepts ("offensiveness" and "swear word") are not correlated. Next, we focus our considerations on "offensiveness" in works about the linguistic and sociolinguistic politeness, specifically regarding the social contexts and the influence of the gender role on certain linguistic uses. ER -