Sociolinguistic factors in the preference for direct and indirect expression of sexual concepts

This chapter presents a cognitive sociolinguistic study of semantic variation and its social meanings. It includes an analysis of 906 expressions of sexual concepts (body parts and physiology) from the Spanish corpus MadSex. These are classified into direct (based on sexual concepts, vulva) and indirect (expressed through other domains, little cupcake) expressions and included in a logistic regression model with internal (sex of the concept, topic of the question) and external (gender, age, education level, prudishness of the speaker) factors as independent variables. The results show that direct construals are related to higher education and formal topics; therefore, they can be interpreted as orthophemistic or straight talking. However, indirect construals are more heterogeneous, and their use can index different meanings: semi-conversational style (in informal topics), affective stance (for male speakers referring to aspects of masculine sexuality), and, finally, euphemism (for older and prudish speakers)