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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 128

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Sociofuckinglinguistics: Mediatizing Taboo

Authors: Thurlow, Crispin; Barrett, Rusty; Jaffe, Alexandra; Jaworski, Adam; Hall, Kira; Squires, Lauren
Submitted by: Thurlow, Crispin (University of Washington, United States of America)

"The moral life of language does not reside in the linguistic properties of utterances alone, nor only in the moment of interaction. The words not spoken, the discourse contexts, the interactional and societal histories, the responses by interlocutors, the conventions of genre, the regimes of language, truth, and knowledge that prevail in the interlocutors’ social worlds—all these are relevant as well." (Judith Irvine, 2011: 35)

A symposium themed around Language and the City inevitably concerns languages on the move and, therefore, language under revision. As languages are increasingly ‘displaced’ and as speakers come into contact in new, complex ways, notions of authenticity, community, society and language itself are brought into question. As a consequence of these social and theoretical shifts, sociolinguists, amongst others, are nowadays obliged to account for ‘the hybrid, the translocal, the spectacular, the idiosyncratic, the creative, and the multimodal’ (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010: 256). To follow the lead of David Bell (2007), it seems that language and sociolinguistics are being, well, ‘meddled’ with. Our panel takes up this challenge by turning to taboo language or, more broadly, discourses of taboo.

Taboo language and discourses of taboo are quintessential products of contact between speakers with different cultural norms, styles/registers and ideologies (Thurlow, 2011; cf. also Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, on ‘metrolingualism’). Taboo talk is always emergent or in flux and often fiercely contested. Taboo talk is also complexly embedded in local cultures/histories of language, often creative and playful and/or parodic (cf. Coupland & Jaworski, 2003), and always  characterized by complex intertextualities and indexicalities (cf. Silverstein, 2003). Often concerned with what ought not to be said and/or with what is not explicitly articulated, taboo talk can present something of a methodological challenge since speech is usually the sine qua non of a sociolinguistics and discourse analysis (Billig, 1997). It is this reliance on implicature that can also give taboo language much of its power to police and produce social values/norms, as well as the subjectivities of speakers and their audiences – real or imagined.

The presenters in this panel all share a concern to going beyond merely descriptive, symptomatic analyses of the ‘denotational semantics’ (Irvine, 2011: 34; cf. Allan & Burridge) of taboo language. Although with a more specifically sociolinguistic approach, our panel takes as its starting point a recent special issue of the Anthropological Quarterly on ‘Verbal Taboo and the Moral Life of Language’ (see Fleming & Lampert, 2011). In this regard, we too are interested in taking a more particularistic and ideological approach to the linguists of taboo in the way that Judith Irvine (quote above) proposes. In an attempt to tighten the focus of our discussion, each paper in this panel will also consider how processes of mediatization sustain or disrupt regimes of linguistic truth concerning taboo talk. Old and new media can be key sites of ‘enregisterment’ (see Johnstone, 2010), as previously impolite ways of talking or shocking topics of conversation become ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’, or associated with different speakers and social spaces.

Pushing the boundaries of writing on ‘verbal taboo’ but also of sociolinguistics more generally, papers in this panel consider a range of different institutional, cultural and interactional contexts, as well as different linguistic and non-linguistic modalities (e.g. speech, written texts, images, typefaces) and different media (e.g. newspapers, websites, works of art). Needless to say, they also cover topics often omitted from academic discourse.