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The semantics of profane quasi-verbs: Social relations in a dynamic framework

Paper · 2026 · Paul Portner

Summary

Formal semantics has largely ignored profane imprecations such as Fuck you! or To hell with X. Portner asks what these "quasi-verb imprecatives" (qv-imprecatives, after Quang 1971) mean and how they work in conversation. He first tests the standard expressive account, which uses Potts-style expressive indices recording how the speaker feels about someone. He argues that emotion alone cannot predict how these utterances behave pragmatically. His alternative is that a successful qv-imprecative performatively alters the social standing that holds between speaker and target. The relation becomes disrupted, so the speaker is no longer bound to show that person the respect and deference that applied before. He formalises this in a dynamic framework where a context holds a social-relation component alongside the common ground, and utterances update partitions within it. Weaker items such as damn and inoffensive uses (friendly jabs, power displays) fall out of the same model. The work matters because it gives a precise treatment of meaning that is radically social and interactional, and that fits neither truth conditions nor ordinary speech-act types.

Key points

  • What qv-imprecatives are not. Quang's original data shows they are neither declaratives, questions nor imperatives: you cannot assert them, answer them or comply with them.
  • English diagnostics separating them from imperatives:
    • no reflexive for a second-person object (Fuck yourself loses the reading);
    • no negation (Don't fuck you);
    • no tag questions.
  • Spanish contrast. Spanish expresses similar meanings with forms that are morphologically imperative or subjunctive (¡Jódete!, ¡Que se joda la clase media!). Morphosyntax is deliberately set aside.
  • Expressive indices. Potts (2007) models feelings as triples ⟨individual, interval in [−1,1], individual⟩. The paper argues these cannot fully capture qv-imprecatives. Related social-index work (McCready 2019, Davis & Gutzmann 2019, Davis & McCready 2020) is closer in spirit.
  • Variation across items and contexts:
    • damn seems more speaker-oriented and may carry an extra expressive component;
    • fuck and to hell with are addressee-oriented acts of disrespect;
    • inoffensive uses occur when the target doesn't care, or when the profanity convention is off (close friends).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Meaning can be a change to a relationship rather than a proposition, modelled as a dynamic update on a separate social component of the context. This is useful wherever utterances act socially instead of informing.
  • I2. Diagnostic tests (reflexivisation, negation, tag questions) separate a look-alike construction from a real clause type. This is a cheap way to decide which category a surface form belongs to.
  • I3. Offensiveness is split into two things: the conventional effect of the act, and whether the target takes offense. Context, such as power or friendship, can block either one.
  • I4. Social meaning and expressive (emotional) meaning are kept as distinct dimensions that one item may carry together, as damn might.
  • I5. One lexical class shows a strength scale, where weaker items remove fewer constraints from the relation. This gives graded effects without separate rules per word.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could keep a speaker–target relation slot per dialogue and let insults, apologies or honorifics update it, separate from factual content.
  • I2 (frames): speech-act classification could use such syntactic tests on the UD tree to avoid labelling Fuck X as a command the addressee must obey.
  • I3 (answer): when reading stories, Mova could explain a character's reaction by asking whether the insult was performed and whether it landed, rather than treating profanity as uniformly hostile.
  • I4 (world): the world of a text could store character emotions and inter-character social relations as separate state types, so each can change independently.
  • I5 (back): generation could choose between milder and stronger expressions by how much relational change the meaning graph encodes.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Georgetown UniversityWashington · United States90 works · 4,732 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksCommunication · 104 works

Cite

Cite as Paul Portner. 2026. The semantics of profane quasi-verbs: Social relations in a dynamic framework. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.19.13

@article{portner2026semantics,
  title = {{The semantics of profane quasi-verbs: Social relations in a dynamic framework}},
  author = {Paul Portner},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.19.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.19.13}
}

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