De Cock, Barbara
[UCL]
Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea
[UCL]
Background and Research question: Like other aspects of the semantic field of sexuality, sexual activities and actions are usually considered linguistic taboos (Allan and Burridge 1991, 2006). As shown in the literature, this has semantic and pragmatic consequences for the speakers who have to deal with them in discourse. This paper aims at combining the focus on the expression of the action itself (at the lexical-semantic level) with how the participants in those activities (agents and patients) are profiled (at the syntactic-pragmatic level). Although the variation in the conceptualisation of the actions is revealing in itself from a sociolinguistic point of view (Pizarro Pedraza 2015), this case study wants to go further, and contrast that aspect with how speakers profile their own or others’ participation in those tabooed activities. We will aim at answering the following research question: Are the semantic resources used for the expression of action verbs related to the onomasiological profiling of the agents? And if this is the case, as we hypothesize, which (conceptual, discursive, social…) factors affect that variation? Empirical data and methods: We will work with a Spanish spoken corpus about sexuality (MadSex). Our study will focus on sexual actions (to have sex, to abort, to masturbate, to prostitute oneself, etc.) and their participants (agents, patients). Our methodological proposal is to combine Cognitive Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis, in order to work at the Semantics-Pragmatics interface. We will analyse the actions semantically (specific concept and construal) and relate them to the profiling of the participants. These may by profiled explicitly: no he conocido nada más que a mi mujer (‘I didn’t know [sexual] anybody else but my wife’); generically: el hombre echa un polvo (‘the man fucks once’); metonymically: en su casa tampoco tienen lo que tienen que tener (‘at home they don’t have what they should have’); etc. The first step of our analysis relies strongly on qualitative analysis, the outcome of which will be analysed quantitatively in a second stage (with descriptive statistics). Expected results and conclusions: Firstly, we expect to define different levels of agentivity in the expression of sexual taboo (see De Cock and Michaud Maturana 2014 for the taboo field of violent death). Secondly, we expect to find conceptual and social factors – at macro- (age, sex, level of education) or micro-level (stances) – to have an effect on the linguistic expression of sexual actions (Pizarro Pedraza 2015), and we are especially interested in analizing whether that effect expands to the profiling of the participants. We hypothesize that there could be a correlation between the semantic construal of the verb and the previously mentioned levels of agentivity. Finally, we expect to draw more general theoretical and methodological conclusions about the Pragmatics-Semantics interface from a cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective, and more in general, about the effect of linguistic taboo on different layers of discourse.


Bibliographic reference |
De Cock, Barbara ; Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea. “The sin but no the sinner”: The expression of sexual actions and their participants.Sociolinguistics Symposium (Université de Murcia, du 14/06/2016 au 18/06/2016). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/175704 |