To study how people deploy swear words, there are always more depths to be plumbed. This study plumbs:
“The Relevance of Taboo Language: An Analysis of the Indexical Values of Swearwords,” Christine Christie, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 58, 2013, pp. 152-169. The author explains:
“The assumption that the use of a particular word or linguistic resource can produce (im)politeness effects in some contexts, but not in all, is uncontroversial. For example, scholarship that addresses swearing as (im)politeness behaviour has repeatedly shown that, as a resource, taboo language can be used to generate a number of communicative effects in different contexts…. There are many questions about the indexing potential of strong swearwords, and how it relates to the location of different metadiscourses of swearing that have yet to be addressed.”