Félix Rodríguez González

Morpho-syntactic variations in English and Spanish clipped words: a contrastive study

Clipping and linguistic variation are inexorably interconnected. Shortened or elliptical words reflect a great deal of variability of the language, especially in the morphological and phonological levels. The object of this study is precisely to explore the phono-graphemic and grammatical variations occurred in the visible changes undergone by clipped words in Spanish and English. A contrastive analysis of this type reveals both expectedly different correspondences in terms of gender and number, and surprisingly parallel lexico-syntactic features. This suggests that clipped or elliptical units are not only necessarily dependent on intrinsic morpho-grammatical and phonological traits, but they are also characterized by regularities and universal patterns that might show disruptive or “corrupted” constructs. This analysis confirms the peculiarities of clipping and linguistic variations in both languages, in an attempt to comprehend the interconnection between functional motivations, and morphological and phonological changes.

Sex in Language: Euphemistic and Dysphemistic Metaphors in Internet Forums

Despite the censorship that has traditionally surrounded sex, the fact remains that sexuality and eroticism are major forces of human life. Although sex-related matters have always been taboo, or precisely for this reason, sex is tempting, even fascinating, for us. In fact, people need to refer to sexual concepts somehow, no matter how much they may be embarrassing, shameful or socially sanctioned. In the process of taboo naming, metaphor—one of the most prolific devices of lexical generation—provides an effective way to refer to topics which are subject to moral and social censorship. The book under review, as its title indicates, offers an analysis of the sex-related metaphorical language used in the antithetical processes of verbal mitigation and offence—that is, euphemism and its opposite dysphemism—in a corpus of almost 200 postings taken from British and American Internet forums. It gives the reader a chance to reflect on the social and communicative functions that sexual metaphors perform in real language use nowadays. Following both a cognitive and a relevance-theoretic approach to language data, Crespo-Fernández widens the field of study of euphemism and dysphemism in the universal taboo area of sex, which he approaches from a wide range of perspectives (e.g. marital intimacy, medical advice, sexual addiction, pornography and sadomasochism). He starts out with the assumption that the interplay between cognition and pragmatics provides the basis for the euphemistic or dysphemistic force of figurative language in naturally-occurring discourse and can prove of invaluable help in exploring a number of key aspects of the dynamics of discursive practices in a corpus of real language data. The book is organized into two main parts: the first (containing two chapters) presents the theoretical issues, and the second (consisting of three chapters) is devoted to the analysis of the metaphors encountered in the corpus. There is also a preface, an introduction, which sketches out the book’s topic and structure, and a foreword by Keith Allan, one of the best-known scholars worldwide in the fields of taboo, euphemism and dysphemism. For ease of reference, there are two appendices, one for euphemisms and one for dysphemisms, listing all the metaphorical items which appear in the corpus, ‘classified by source domain’ (p. viii). Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2017 Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 252–262Despite the censorship that has traditionally surrounded sex, the fact remains that sexuality and eroticism are major forces of human life. Although sex-related matters have always been taboo, or p...