Les fonctions de l’argot du sexe appréhendées au travers des anaphores dans le discours pornographique externe

Abstract

In the era of a new sexual revolution marked mainly by coital overstimulation (Melzer 2019: 32) and sensory exploration through practices offering new uses of the body (Breton 2017: 188), the designation of an entity in the mental representation that exists in the extralinguistic world seems extremely striking, especially with regard to the construction of anaphoric reference in new media. In this regard, it is important to note that at a time of body worship reinforced by the use of new technologies, various manifestations of love are popularized on social networks as well as on thematic sites that have become essential to strategies of effective marketing. Among these web pages, there are very specific portals, namely those with pornographic content, called X pages, where one can very easily have access to numerous photos and videos allowing users to satisfy different carnal appetites. Indeed, it turns out that the immense popularity and, therefore, the effectiveness of these web portals today is not limited only to their visual side, although it is, of course, the image that plays a key role here. Analysis of a particular genre of external pornographic discourse (Paveau 2014: 50) that we propose in this paper is based on a corpus for which we have collected diastratic variational material from non-standard language, namely a hundred information sheets, referred to as erotic biographies of 93 gay and bisexual porn actors, gathered on the French-speaking site https://www.videosxgays.com. The objective of our study is to analyse the functions of sex slang apprehended through anaphoric references, which are expressed in multimodal texts with a persuasive vocation, where images, films or photos play a key referential role. In short, we will try to highlight the discursive effects that this linguistic variation seems to produce by exploiting the anaphoric reference in a particularly persuasive context, with its enormous range of specific lexical and stylistic means: periphrases, metonymies, hyperboles, etc.