Upcoming Event

Please join the School of Linguistics and Language Studies for a guest talk by visiting scholar Sophie Eyssette.

Taboo and Discursive Absence: A Cross-Linguistics Corpus-Assisted
Discourse Analysis to Triangulate Missing Data

160,000 children are victims of incest every year in France (CIIVISE, 2023). In the UK, no number is provided by the official authorities. The absence of data in the UK does not mean there is no incest; rather, it suggests that the prevalence of incest is still a strong taboo. Thus, this paper aims to introduce joint data and method triangulations to find discursive absence. For this purpose, this talk contrasts the media discourse on the incest taboo in the French and British press from 2017 to 2022.

The methodology applies a double triangulation to avoid overinterpreting absence on a taboo topic. Therefore, the cross-linguistic comparison between the French and British press offers a data triangulation, reinforced by the method triangulation combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. As such, the collocates and concordances of terms like incest, child, and sexual, are analysed cross-linguistically and contextualised cross-culturally.

The findings demonstrate that the British press tends to depict incest as an eroticised intrafamilial relationship, whereas the French press primarily covers incest as child sexual abuse. Thus, the methodology of cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis enables to find missing data. This talk sheds light on the absence of coverage of the incest taboo as child sexual abuse in the British press, mirroring the absence of data from the national authorities.

Sophie Eyssette is a visiting scholar at Carleton University. Her PhD research focuses on “Incest and Taboo Language in the French and British Press (2017-2022)”. After graduating in Intercultural Communication and Translation at the School of Interpretation and Translation (ISIT) in Paris, she was admitted to the PhD programme of Studies in English Literatures, Language and Translation at La Sapienza University of Rome, in cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Poland.