Stance, Identity and the Lexical-Semantic Variation of Taboos: The Abortion Debate in Spanish Online Newspapers’ Comments and Face-to-Face Interviews in contrast.

Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea [UCL]

Verbal taboo is at a complex crossroads where many disciplines meet. This has resulted in some theoretical and methodological diffusion, and some pertinent questions have been left quite unattended, or only partially resolved; namely, those concerning the indexical power of variation in the expression of taboo concepts, requiring a sociolinguistic perspective. As has been demonstrated in Sociolinguistics in the last years, linguistic features are tools at hand for speakers to build their identities in discourse; and their variation is meaningful (Eckert 2009). This study defends that taboo concepts are extremely revealing in this perspective, because they participate in a complex interplay of social, moral and emotional, deeply-rooted regimes (Irvine 2011), manifested in discourse in a variety of ways. In this paper, we compare the results of two studies on the concept of abortion in contemporary Spanish. The first is based on a corpus of readers’ comments on online newspapers’ articles the day of the approval of the new Law of Abortion in Spain, on March 2010. The second is a corpus of interviews on sexuality that we collected ad hoc in Madrid. We focus on a subset of questions based on the Law of Abortion. Our aim is to analyze how opposed discourses of abortion utter the concept, and how they do it in different contexts (written vs. oral, anonymous vs. face-to-face, etc.). In order to cope with the lack of analytical solutions for the study of lexical-semantic variation in Sociolinguistics, we base our method on Cognitive Semantics. We consider that lexical-semantic choices are strategies contributing to the construction of social identities based on differences in conceptualizations (Kristiansen and Dirven 2008). The results present variation corresponding to different stances, roughly Pro-life and Pro-choice discourses. Both stances are better represented in the anonymous comment’s corpus, where there is consequently more variation than in the interviews. The very consideration of abortion as a taboo or not is an ideological statement, therefore, we find contrasting tendencies in the use of the literal abortion vs. non-literal semantic variants (metaphors, metonymies, etc.). Within these, lexical variation (eliminate, murder… vs. decide, voluntary interruption of pregnancy…) reflects a complex matrix of intertextual, cultural, and historical references that determine the local shape of an international debate. This mixed method copes with the traditional difficulties of the sociolinguistic analysis of lexical-semantic variation. It achieves to analyze differences at the lexical-semantic level in the discursive construction of opposed stances; and furthermore, to show how these stances are performed differently under the circumstances of contexts like online written comments and oral interviews. The analysis of taboo concepts’ utterance is extremely revealing of how identities are constructed in discourse at this level, because they take on very local, social meanings.