Résumé

Although taboo has become an ever-increasing widespread linguistic resource within audiovisual contexts (Sapolsky et al. 2010; Bednarek 2019), and despite the importance sociolinguistic profiles hold in cinematic products, little research has been carried out on the topic.
Thus, this study aims at examining the role taboo language plays in the movies. In order to do so, the presentation will combine a theoretical approach - geared towards the cinematic tradition of how taboo is used in the movies, the stereotyping of fictional characters through taboo and the relationship established between the use of taboo and the multimodal and ephemeral nature of cinematic products, with an applied approach – which presents the frequency of taboo words in six North-American movies as well as their functions. Based on the findings, this study suggests that taboo in cinema discourse can be disclosed in two different layers of functions: an intratextual function, concerning the role taboo plays within the narrative; and an extratextual function, related to the role taboo plays beyond the story, i.e. between the movie and the receivers. Further, more detailed, analysis showed that taboo is used intratextually, with an expletive, offensive, social or stylistic function, and, extratextually, with a mimetic, comic or ideological function; the frequency of each will help us characterize taboo in this audiovisual corpus.