The MadSex Project: Some aspects of a cognitive sociolinguistic study of sexual concepts in Madrid.
(2016) Sociolinguistics Symposium — Location: Université de Murcia (14.June.2016)
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- Abstract
- This paper presents an ongoing ‘Third Wave Cognitive Sociolinguistics’ research on the variation of sexual concepts. Linguistic taboo is defined as a social phenomenon (Allan and Burridge 2006), but studies on the variation of referential taboo concepts are rare, especially in speech, since studying linguistic taboo is a challenge for (socio)linguists at various stages of the research. This study has faced two kinds of problems: 1. the selection of an adequate corpus (with abundant linguistic and social data), and 2. a suited theory and method to analyse semantic variation in social context. Both have required the implementation of hybrid solutions. Due to the lack of available data in Spanish corpora, we collected MadSex (Madrilenian Spoken Corpus of Sexuality). It is an oral corpus composed of 54 interviews about a variety of topics related to sexuality. The interviews are based on an opinion questionnaire, with fixed questions designed to elicit the target concepts, indirectly. They were collected in Madrid by three interviewers, in two districts with different cultural and ideological profiles, imposing interesting challenges regarding ethics and fieldwork. The transcribed corpus reaches ca. one million words, it includes very varied sexual concepts (body parts, physiological processes, activities, contraception, sexual identities…) and social information about the speakers (gender, education, age…). The extreme variability in the expression of the concepts has limited for now the use of automatic extraction tools, forcing us to work with manual extraction. In order to study semantic variation from a sociolinguistic point of view, we adopt the Cognitive Sociolinguistic framework (Kristiansen and Dirven 2008, Geeraerts, Kristiansen et al. 2010, Geeraerts and Kristiansen 2014). In particular, we focus in the analysis of different layers of conceptual onomasiological variation. In agreement with studies of the Third Wave (Eckert 2005, 2009), our own proposal relies as well in the inclusion of micro-social variables (apart from the macro-), such as stances built in the speakers’ discourses. They are especially interesting for the study of sexual concepts, since discourses about sexuality are known to be built on local meanings (Bucholtz and Hall 2004, Motsenbacher 2012). The results of our case studies shed light on how the variation of taboo concepts contributes to the creation of social meanings (functions of semantic resources –metaphors, metonymies…-, interaction of social variables with concept features -referring to feminine or masculine sexuality…), opening a new perspective for the sociolinguistic analysis of taboo concepts.
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Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2016). The MadSex Project: Some aspects of a cognitive sociolinguistic study of sexual concepts in Madrid. Sociolinguistics Symposium, Université de Murcia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185609