What the f***: An acoustic-pragmatic analysis of meaning in The Wire

Abstract

The award-winning television drama, The Wire, contains a famous scene in which Detectives Moreland and McNulty discuss the crime scene they are investigating using only variations of a single expletive—fuck. Despite limited vocabulary, viewers are able to extract meaning and interpret the scene. This study considers all of the expletives produced in the scene, and carries out an acoustic analysis of / ʌ /—F1~F3 (midpoint and averages) and vowel duration. These measurements are then used in combination with Gricean (Grice 1975) and neo-Gricean (e.g. Horn 1984) pragmatic analysis in an attempt to categorize the intended meaning of fuck as: intensification, confusion, dissatisfaction or suspicion (Fairman 2009). Vowel measurements are considered for Moreland and McNulty individually, and vowel normalization is carried out in order to determine pragmatic categorizations across both detectives. This paper argues that acoustic-phonetic analysis can augment Gricean and neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis by providing a means of determining whether what appears at a lexical level to be conversationally implicated meaning is in fact conventional implicature conveyed at the phonetic level.