Acceso usuarios
Ursula Reutner, Philipp Heidepeter
Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generallyappears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthologyrepresenting a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses theexcerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and aquantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the imagesthat describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizesthem according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor,synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and furthersubdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as floraand fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear,instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, thearticle shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content.The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followedby metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, asthe dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and femalebody parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluationof common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeperunderstanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of theearly use of sexual euphemisms in French.
