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.

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.

Taboo in Discourse: Studies on Attenuation and Offence in Communication combines cognitive, multimodal, translation and (critical) discourse-related issues with the intent of widening the field of study of taboo in communication. This volume explores the complex interplay between taboo and language in a range of social contexts, cultural settings and real-world discourse types: from political speeches to television series through cartoons, novels, oral interviews or official advertisements. Through a selection of empirical studies anchored in analyses of authentic and contextualized language data, this book examines the communicative functions of the different categories of taboo naming, from euphemism (attenuation) to dysphemism (offence). By bringing together contrasting (yet complementary) examples of taboo-related research, this volume yields insights into the way taboo emerges in discourse and allows to have access to attitudes, stereotypes and value judgments regarding taboo which are more or less implicitly communicated in the public sphere.