Playful Metaphors in Sex Jokes and Socio-Cultural Implications

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the interconnected relationship between playful metaphors and sex jokes at the linguistic, conceptual, and discourse levels. Two ontological conceptual metaphors and two specific-level metaphors emerged. They demonstrated that variations in the form of empty metaphors and the creative invention of metaphors are still fundamentally iconic. The conceptual representation of sex acts is closely related to the cultural and ethnic specificity embedded in folk knowledge, such as food culture, the broader context of the physical environment and historical traditions, and the conception of family relationships. Metaphors in sex stories showed that the shared values of Hakka people have pragmatic and socio-cultural implications. Seen as an in-between other by their blood family and their in-laws’ family, Hakka women are under dual strict cultural disciplines for their expected behaviors as women and for their expected roles as daughters-in-law. Metaphors in sex jokes serve as covert and humorous carriers to get around the uneasiness of socially tabooed and embarrassing topics regarding Hakka women and at the same time maintain relational and social harmony.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor Dr. Herbert Colston for their constructive suggestions and comments. Responsibility for any errors remains with the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Various terms for the possible forms of script oppositions are used at different levels of abstraction, according to Attardo and Raskin (1991, p. 308). In the current study, the forms of opposition are referred to as domains to maintain consistency with the metaphor hierarchy employed for analysis.

² Regarding the origin of the Taiwan Hakka language, Chappell and Lamarre (2005) have maintained that a linguistically more reasonable view is that the Hakka language emerged from the southern Gan dialect during the Song Dynasty (10th~13th centuries), with the Hakka dialects mingling and carrying some linguistic features similar to non-Chinese languages, such as Miao, Yao, and She. With several subsequent migrations, Hakka people moved to southeastern Jiangxi Province and western Fujian Province, and then farther south to northeastern Guangdong Province. Thereafter, Hakka people migrated southward to Taiwan in the early Qing Dynasty.

³ According to the demographic survey report by the Hakka Affairs Council (客委會 Hakka Affairs Council (HAC), 2017) in Taiwan, the Hakka population comprises 19.3% of the total population, with approximating 4.5 million people, and it is the second largest ethnic group. The Taiwan Hakka language refers to the Hakka six dialects spoken in Taiwan: Sixian (Northern and Southern varieties), Hailu, Daipu, Raoping, and Zhoan. Dialectal variations of sounds, tones, and some lexical items are observed among them. To maintain consistency, the data are transliterated based on the Sixian dialect.

⁴ I thank Joseph Tomei, who raised the issue of fairly representing how the data would be collected to avoid possible bias toward minority ethnic groups during my presentation at ICLC 15.

⁵ The Chinese characters and the romanization system in this paper were rendered as in the Taiwan Hakka Dictionary of Frequently Used Words (臺灣客家話常用詞辭典http://hakka.dict.edu.tw/) produced by the Ministry of Education in 2008. The following tone numbers were used to represent the pitch values in the examples: 1, rising; 2, falling; 3, high level; 4, short low; 5, low level; and 8, short high. The following grammatical abbreviations were also used: ASP, aspect marker; CL, classifier; CONJ, conjunction; LOC, locative marker; NEG, negation marker; PAR, particle; PASS, passive marker; and SF, suffix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan [MOST 105-2410-H-004-179-MY3].