Sex in Language: Euphemistic and Dysphemistic Metaphors in Internet forums

by Eliecer Crespo-Fernández

Metaphor has long provided a rich way to speak about the unspeakable, to refer to delicate issues. Sex is one such area. This book follows a cognitive-linguistic and relevance-theoretic approach to the language of sex, considering metaphor as a bridge that brings together mind and language. It does this through the analysis of the antithetical mechanisms of verbal mitigation and offence . These two mechanisms are (more commonly know as) euphemism and (its lesser known companion term) dysphemism.

The volume reflects on the social and communicative functions that sexual metaphors perform in a sample of almost two hundred postings taken from internet forums. How do people think about sex? How do people avoid talking about sex? How do people paraphrase sexual topics? It offers an account of how real language users understand sexual taboo in present-day English and also a great grounding in manual corpus work on a qualitative level.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2015

Reviews

[livewugreactions · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the explanations of how sexual metaphors operate through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory and stuff, but I do feel that the sociocultural internet aspect was a bit neglected. Why were the specific forums chosen over others? I think an examination of the context that these metaphors arose in is essential to understanding them.