This research aims at finding types of swearing employed by the characters in the movie Sweet Sixteen, knowing how the context situation affects the use and the meaning of swearing, and knowing how the sociocultural background of the characters influences the level of swearing' offensiveness. This research is a descriptive qualitative research under the framework of Sociopragmatics study. The relationship between social phenomenon and methods becomes the focus of this research.
The findings reveal that there are six types of swearing expression employed by the characters in Sweet Sixteen movie, namely Descriptive Swearing, Idiomatic Swearing, Abusive Swearing, Emphatic Swearing, Cathartic Swearing and Name-calling Swearing. There are fourteen types of function used by the characters of Sweet Sixteen movie: predicative negative adjective, adverbial booster, cursing expletive, destinational usage, emphatic adverb, figurative extension of literal meaning, general expletive, idiomatic set phrase, imagery based on literal meaning, premodifying intensifying negative adjective, pronominal form with undefined referent, personalinsult referring to identified entity, reclaimed usage, and religious oath used for emphasis. It is found that the context situation of the conversation which consists of the situations, the participants, the ends, the acts sequence, the key, the instrumentalities, the norms and the genres, affects the use and the meaning of swearing expression in the movie.The results also show that the sociocultural background of the characters such as the speaker-hearer relationship, social-physical context, and the particular word used, influences the level of swearing’ offensiveness in Sweet Sixteen movie.
Keywords: Swearing, Offensiveness Rate, Scottish movie