Expletive insertion: a morphological approach

English words containing inserted expletives, like absobloodylutely or unbefuckinglievable , are often said to be created by ‘infixation’. One goal of this work is argue that such claims self-contradictory. Infixes affixes, but the expletives not. Rather, they themselves morphologically complex, not bound, and can occur with from different syntactic categories. Hence, full words, only property share infixes their phonologically determined insertion point. Due these factors, I suggest discontinuous compounds instead, in which expletive forms a new word it interrupts. further compounding even rarer than actual infixation cross-linguistically, makes typological outlier. On other hand, try show apparently idiosyncratic properties compatible at more abstract level. In addition, article seeks establish some tentative diachronic cognitive mechanisms may have led emergence retention insertion. The overall conclusion that, once morphological phenomena analyzed sufficient detail, novel structural patterns parallels emerge.