Finding Absence in Corpus Linguistics, Taboo Language and Incest in the French and English press (2017-2022)

Taboos have been prevalent in all societies throughout history. Taboos prescribe behaviours related to death, food, and sexuality, and one of the primary sexual taboos is incest. It is necessary to distinguish between social taboo and linguistic taboo (Diffloth, 2014, p. 157). Incest is worth exploring from a sociolinguistic perspective as it is both a social and linguistic taboo. Additionally, taboo language is often defined as swear words (Allan, 2019; Allan & Burridge, 2007; Bednarek, 2019; Jay et al., 2008; Madan et al., 2017; Pedraza, 2018; Reilly et al., 2020); however, this paper aims to identify taboo words related to incest that are not swear words, but rather words that are considered too taboo to be spoken (Casas Gómez, 2012; Khairullina et al., 2020). Therefore, this research aims to analyse the unspeakable. To do this, this study addresses the methodological challenge of finding absence in a corpus. The issue of finding absence has been discussed in corpus linguistics (Duguid & Partington, 2018; Partington, 2014; Schröter & Taylor, 2018) and methods have been developed to compare corpora to see if certain elements are missing from one dataset to another (Alcántara-Plá & Ruiz-Sánchez, 2018; Strand, 2018). However, in this study, absence is the main selection criterion for building a corpus on incest taboo. The corpus consists of eight British newspapers from October 13, 2017 to October 14, 2022, covering the period from the emergence of the #MeToo movement up to the first collection day. The goal is to find articles that discuss incest without using the word "incest." Therefore, the methodological challenge in carrying out this corpus linguistics study is to find a missing word through a search query that uses specific search terms.