Taboo Language and Signalling Nouns on incest: When newspapers substitute, rename, or define taboo topics

This paper investigates Signalling Nouns (SNs) on the incest taboo. It analyses how SNs shape the media discourse of incest in the British press between 2017 and 2022. SNs are abstract nouns that encapsulate the content of the preceding or following clauses. They have been extensively studied in academic writing, but their signalling role in media discourse remains underexplored. In a corpus built on taboo language, this paper investigates how signalling nouns substitute, rename, or define a topic that is highly taboo: incest. Furthermore, the paper raises the question of the inherent abstractness of SNs and the writer’s intent when SNs are used in the context of a taboo topic.