Taboo language in a sample of Egyptian op-eds: A corpus-based socio-cognitive study

There is an extensive body of work on taboo language, including metaphor and metonymy, but particular attention needs to be paid to (i) serious genres (and especially op-eds) and (ii) non-English speaking (or non-western) cultures. The present study uses the Sketch Engine search tool on a corpus of 1844 op-ed articles (967,715 words) by columnist Dandrawi El-Hawari of Egypt’s private pro-government newspaper Youm el-Saba . Questions about how taboo words are used in Arabic op-eds (or the selected corpus as a sample of the Egyptian population) thus arise. Other questions include: How frequently do vulgar, profane, discriminatory, threatening or potentially libellous words, cases where impoliteness (or rather hate speech) is genuine or presumably intended, occur in this serious discourse genre? Which taboo words feature more prominently in Egyptian opinion articles (and especially in the op-eds under investigation)? And what implications do our findings have for cross-cultural understanding and impoliteness research? The analysis of taboo words in this discourse genre can make a useful contribution not only to socio-cognitive and cross-cultural pragmatics, but also to forensic linguistics. We found frequent breaches of the expected conduct by the op-ed columnist in question, because private newspapers define different contexts. A general taxonomy of seven practices has been proposed.