Pardon my Spanish: attenuation of taboo through metapragmatic euphemistic formulae

Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea [UCL]

The proscription surrounding taboos limits but does not eliminate their presence in the discourse. Even in seemingly formal situations, such as sociolinguistic interviews, speakers express problematic or offensive concepts (referential taboo) and swear words (non-referential taboo). In general, the expression of taboos responds to the speaker’s will to construct certain pragmatic meanings (emphasis, offense, irony...) (Crespo-Fernández 2007; Jay & Janschewitz 2008) and/or a certain social identity. However, the expression of referential or non-referential taboos is sometimes accompanied by euphemistic formulae (Casas Gómez 1986), as the Spanish con perdón ‘apologies’ or the English Pardon my French. These formulae allow the speaker to combine his will to express a taboo and, at the same time, avoid the possible offense caused to the interlocutor. This chapter focuses on these formulae, still not extensively studied in the literature on linguistic taboo, in order to advance towards a classification of their variants and explore their distribution with respect to the type of taboo and the pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions that they fulfill in discourse. The study is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the expressions present in the Madrilenian Spoken Corpus of Sexuality, MadSex (Pizarro Pedraza 2013) and aims to contribute to the study of linguistic taboo at the interface between syntax and discourse (Pizarro Pedraza & De Cock forthcoming).