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.C 122.6 Strategic cursing uses more cognitive resourcesthan automatic cursing.C 122.7 Cursing habits depend on personality factors.C 13,152.8 Cursing habits depend on social learning history.C 14,152.9 Cursing styles are both conventional and idiosyncratic.C 142.10 Propositional cursing obeys semantic and syntactic rules.C 163.0 Cursing episodes and conventions depend on sociocultural contexts.P IV3.1 Cursing episodes vary in appropriateness andoffensiveness depending on context.C 173.2 Cursing reflects a culture s beliefs about religion, C 17,22taboos, word magic, and disgust.233.3 Cursing episodes reflect power relationships.C 18,203.4 Cursing reflects a culture s construct of gender identity.C 193.5 Cursing reflects a culture s view of humor elicitation.C 213.6 Cursing is restricted through laws and etiquette.C 24,253.7 Cursing is a defining feature of sexual harassment, fightingwords, abuse, and obscenity laws.C 253.8 Cross-cultural studies of Tourette Syndrome revealcross-cultural language values.C 26Abbreviations: P, Part; C, Chapter. 28 Chapter 4Supporting and Integrating the PostulatesParts II, III and IV review the research and literature that support each of theNPS postulates.Since this text gives a linear review, the presentation mightgive the impression that these postulates are independent; but they are not, andwherever possible, integrative statements about the interrelated postulates inthe NPS Theory are made.Keep in mind that we are trying to assess thevalidity of these postulates in an integrative fashion because each NPS systeminfluences a speaker s likelihood of cursing in an integrative fashion.Some cursing factors have more influence on a speaker than do others atany particular time.For example, children do not have the cultural and socialknowledge that adults do.Social pressures that inhibit cursing (e.g., polite-ness, etiquette) will weigh less heavily on a preschool child than on his or herparents.Further, a Touretter will be overwhelmed by the neurological condi-tions that dominate all the psychological and cultural factors that operate toinhibit cursing.Ideally, at the point where we have sufficient knowledge of each of thepostulates in the NPS Theory, we will be able to use the knowledge to writelikelihood equations to predict how and when a speaker will curse.Since theseequations will indicate how people produce and understand cursing expres-sions, we can consider the NPS-driven equations as a grammar.Each Person Learns the Grammar of CursingOne goal of NPS is to predict the neurological, psychological, and sociocul-tural conditions under which cursing occurs.These conditions are presentedas a set of conditional (if-then) statements that make up the grammar ofcursing: When and how cursing will occur, and when cursing is unlikely tooccur.The more accurately we know how NPS dimensions affect a speaker scursing, the more powerful is the predictive power of grammar.Some of thegrammatical rules for cursing are already known or are estimable; others willtake some work to finalize.A rule takes the general form:IF neurological state + psychological state + sociocultural setting, THEN(+) or (-) likelihood of cursingThroughout the text, a (+) indicates that cursing is likely, and a (-) indicates Postulates of the NPS Theory 29that cursing is unlikely.The neurological state includes pertinent brain activ-ity, brain function/dysfunction, and emotional state.The psychological stateincludes age, personality, past rewards or punishments for cursing, and per-sonal speech habits.Sociocultural setting covers the social and physicalsetting, speaker-listener relationships, topic of discussion, mode of communi-cation, gender identity, and cultural affiliations.This conditional rule orgrammar answers Patrick s questions about why we curse and why we choosethe words we do.There is enough known about gender-related insults (e.g., prick, bitch,cunt, homo) to make some probability statements about them at the presenttime.Men and women, boys and girls, tend to insult each other in predictable,age-related ways.The data reported in Cursing in America (Jay, 1992a,Chapter 4) can be used to establish probabilities about what men say towomen, and vice versa, in the form of gender-related insults.Speakers use the names of body parts (and other referents) to insult eachother, but in curious ways, according to these data.For example, males use theword ass to refer to a body part (She has a fat ass!) and are less likely to useass to refer to someone who deviated from social expectations (He is a sillyass!).Female uses of ass are more equivocal; they use ass to refer to the bodypart and to social deviations at equal rates.But other body-part words vary intheir likelihood to denote body parts.For example, consider the data for theword asshole; both males and females use the word to refer to a social deviant(He is a lying, cheating asshole!) and rarely (%), if ever, to refer to a body part(%My asshole hurts!).But the grammar requires additional frequency-of-usage data to be complete.The probability of cursing as a function of communicative context hasbeen established with likelihood-of-usage ratings and with offensiveness rat-ings (Jay, 1992a, pp.83-95)
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