Calling things by their name: Exploring the social meanings in the preference for sexual (in)direct construals
(2018) Linguistic Taboo Revisited. Novel insights from Cognitive perspectives — ISBN: [978-3-11-058031-0], 245-268, published
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- This chapter is a cognitive sociolinguistic approach to the preferences for direct versus indirect construals and their social meanings. The study is based on the analysis of 906 expressions of sexual concepts (body parts and physiologi- cal processes) from the corpus MadSex (Pizarro Pedraza, 2013). These are divided in direct (based on sexual concepts, vulva) and indirect expressions (based on domains other than sexuality, little cupcake) and included in a logistic regression model with internal (sex of the concept, topic of the interview question) and exter- nal factors (sex, age, level of education, prudishness of the speaker) as independ- ent variables. The results show that direct construals are used more by speakers with higher studies and in questions about more formal topics, where they can be interpreted as orthophemistic or straight talking (Allan and Burridge 2006). Indi- rect construals are more heterogeneous and therefore their use can be explained by different motivations: as a marker of a semi-conversational style in questions about informal topics, as an affective resource for male speakers talking about aspects of their own sexuality, and as euphemistic strategy for older speakers and prudish speakers, with a true intention of concealing the taboo meanings.
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Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2018). Calling things by their name: Exploring the social meanings in the preference for sexual (in)direct construals. In Andrea Pizarro Pedraza (ed.), Linguistic Taboo Revisited. Novel insights from Cognitive perspectives (pp. 245-268). Mouton De Gruyter. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/227262