Investigsting Functions of Linguistic Taboos in Contemporary Iranian Cinema

The present study explores the functions of linguistic taboos in Iranian contemporary cinema, and and the effect of gender on the film characters and screenwriters in expressing them. Twenty Iranian movies in a twenty-year period from 1998 to 2018 shaped the corpus of this sociolinguistic study. To analyze the data, a revised classification of Wardhaugh's (2006) framework was used. The fidnings showed that among Wardhaugh's classification, attention, stimulation and humiliation were observed in Iranian contemporary cinema. Moreover, four new functions, namely emphasis, psychological relief, fear, and expressions of affection, were also identified in the Iranian corpus. Results showed that the taboo words related to psychological relief were the most frequently used taboo words (49%) in the corpus. The results also revealed that male characters made the most use of taboo terms in comparison with the females. Female screenwriters, however, were the ones who employed more taboo terms in their plays than the males. The result may help to effectively undertand the informal expressions of language, and it eplxores the hidden layers in which emotion are expressed in human's conversation. The findings may have implications for playwriters, screenwrites, language designers, linguists and even language teachers