Taking stance towards sexual taboo through semantic variation

Background and research question: In the last years, a number of scholars have underlined the social and cognitive nature of linguistic taboo phenomena (Casas Gómez, 2009; Crespo Fernández, 2008; Chamizo Domínguez, 2009). The definition of linguistic taboo, the delimitation of the tabooed areas and the rules that determine how speakers should behave towards them in discourse, are highly dependent on linguistic ideologies entrenched in each particular society. In that sense, the utterance of a linguistic taboo concept and its particular linguistic expression imply a decision on how to behave towards those rules on the part of the speaker. For instance, in the context of the prolife vs. prochoice debate, Lakoff (1996) argues that the semantic construal of a concept such as ‘abortion’ depends on the speaker’s stance towards abortion itself (also Janicki, 2006). It would be important to know whether the expression of other taboo concepts will also have a social or cultural grounding. More precisely: how does the stance towards linguistic taboo influence the actual semantic choices of the speakers when expressing a sexual concept? Based on previous studies (Pizarro Pedraza, 2015) we will test the hypothesis that the micro-social, discursive variable ‘stance’ has a strong influence on semantic variation, and we will test its interaction with macro-social and conceptual variables. Data: We work with our own corpus of 54 face-to-face interviews in Spanish, designed for the indirect elicitation of sexual concepts. It was collected in two districts of Madrid, controlling for the social information of the speakers. Moreover, it is also annotated for micro-social variables, such as the speakers’ stance towards talking about sex, among others. Analytic methods: Building on Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Geeraerts et al. 2010; Geeraerts & Kristiansen, forthcoming; Kristiansen & Dirven 2008) and Third Wave Sociolinguistics (Eckert 2005, 2010), we work with mixed methods, including qualitative and quantitative techniques. Due to the nature of our data, the first phase of our analysis is based on the manual extraction and coding of the sexual expressions according to the semantic analysis of each token and to the stance of the speakers towards taboo, based on their answers to the interview. After the automatic coding of the rest of the variables (gender, age, education, etc.), we will analyse quantitatively their effect on the construal of sexual concepts. Preliminary results: An initial analysis shows that speakers who present themselves as “not embarrassed” towards linguistic taboos have similar semantic behaviours (preference for direct construal) versus speakers who manifest certain “embarrassment”, which seems to prove that their stance towards linguistic taboo is also coherently performed through their semantic choices