The variation of ‘to menstruate’ in Spanish online forum for women
(2017) ICLAVE 9 — Location: University of Malaga (6.June.2017)
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- Abstract
- Not all linguistic taboos are equally taboo. When Allan & Burridge (1991: 52-53) carried out their experiment to measure the revoltingness rating of different taboos, “menstruation” was rated by their male informants at the maximum level, just as “vomit and shit”. Indeed, within feminine sexuality menstruation appears to be especially stigmatized. Our corpus studies (Pizarro Pedraza 2013) showed that sexual physiological phenomena tended to be expressed indirectly more frequently than body parts, and that the tendency was especially outspoken for menstruation. However, the data showed sociolinguistic variation: the result was actually true for men, rather than for women. As part of their own sexuality, women generally express the concept through direct variants. In this cognitive sociolinguistic study we would like to explore how women refer to the concept TO MENSTRUATE, by focusing on the variation within the construction Pronoun + verb + la menstruación/la regla/el period (ex. me vino la regla ‘I had my period’) in a corpus of forum comments from the website enfemenino.com. The verbs that can happen in the second slot bajar, venir, llegar… construe the event from different perspectives (as happening from within or without the woman’s body). Moreover, we know that there is stylistic variation in the nominal variants present in the last slot: regla being the most informal and menstruación the most formal. Based on the assumption that the different facets of online contexts are related to a variety of social interactions (Herring 2007) and written vernaculars, we focus specifically on those from the sexual health section of the website. The corpus is composed of more than 13000 threads where women discuss personal problems, either to ask for or to give advice. In that sense, the corpus is a good example of the intermingling for the private and public spheres in computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Androutsopoulos 2011) in a context that allows for anonymity but also in-group solidarity. We use part-of-speech tags as approximations to constructions to automatically extract the linguistic expressions with the structure Pronoun + verb + la menstruación/la regla/el periodo. We will first measure the distribution of the different verbs with each nominal variant in order to determine possible combinatorial preferences. Then, we will measure the impact of conceptual and sociolinguistic variables (embodied perspective, type of speech act, degree of formality, etc.) on the preference for different constructions.
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Pizarro Pedraza, A., & Dirk De Hertog. (2017). The variation of ‘to menstruate’ in Spanish online forum for women. ICLAVE 9, University of Malaga. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/177916