36.837, Confs: LLCD 2025 Workshop: "Language, end of life, death and bereavement: an interdisciplinary perspective" (France)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-837. Sat Mar 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.837, Confs: LLCD 2025 Workshop: "Language, end of life, death and bereavement: an interdisciplinary perspective" (France)

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Date: 08-Mar-2025
From: Océane Foubert [oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr]
Subject: LLCD 2025 Workshop: "Language, end of life, death and bereavement: an interdisciplinary perspective"


LLCD 2025 Workshop: "Language, end of life, death and bereavement: an
interdisciplinary perspective"

Date: 01-Sep-2025 - 03-Sep-2025
Location: University of Lille, France
Contact: Océane Foubert
Contact Email: oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr
Meeting URL: https://llcd2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/8

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Workshop title: Language, end of life, death, and bereavement: an
interdisciplinary perspective
Organisers: Giuditta Caliendo, Océane Foubert, Catherine Ruchon
(University of Lille)
Submission deadline: March 30, 2025
Call for paper: https://llcd2025.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/7
Keywords: linguistic representations of death and end of life;
bereavement; taboo; euphemism; metaphor
Since the advent of transdisciplinary death studies in the 1970s, a
plethora of research has been conducted in the humanities and social
sciences on death-related issues, including end-of-life conditions and
bereavement. This research has been undertaken in fields such as
anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy, and sociology (see for
example Thomas 1975, Aries 1977, Baudry 1999, Molinié 2006, Clavandier
2009). In linguistics, research has addressed issues related to
representations of death since the 1990s. While this research may be
diverse in its approach, the question of what is said or not said
(also because of societal and cultural prohibitions) constitutes the
underlying connection between linguistic research on death-related
subjects.
Many linguistic studies on death focus on the representation of death
as a taboo subject (Gatambuki 2018, Biseko 2024). The observation that
“some experiences are too intimate and vulnerable to be discussed
without linguistic safeguards” (Crespo Fernández 2006: 1) is the
starting point for these studies. They are based on the influential
work of Allan and Burridge (2006: 11), who define taboo as “a
proscription of behavior for a specifiable community of one or more
persons, at a specifiable time, in specifiable contexts”. One of the
main linguistic safeguards that has been investigated in this respect
corresponds to the use of euphemisms (Jamet 2010, Xin 2021). These can
be observed at the level of lexical units, for example in
circumlocutions (e.g. garden of remembrance), or at the level of
metaphorical expressions, corresponding to the DEATH IS LOSS metaphor,
among others. The use of these euphemistic devices to refer to death
has been studied in different genres, such as obituaries
(Crespo-Fernández 2006) and TV series (Jamet 2010).
Linguistic studies have also examined the representation of other
death-related subjects, such as the end of life and bereavement,
especially in communication in healthcare. Since the late 20th century
(Drew and Heritage 1992), research has been conducted on the
linguistic practices of patients, healthcare practitioners (HCPs),
(bereaved) relatives, and the communication between them. Here too,
metaphors are studied to see how they can both facilitate and hinder
communication and well-being (Littlemore and Turner 2020). For
example, Semino et al. (2020) have studied metaphors used by cancer
patients in the UK and have found that violence-related metaphors in
doctor-patient communication can be both empowering and disempowering.
In France, recent studies have sought to establish corpora of
interactions between patients, (bereaved) relatives and HCPs
(Auriac-Slusarczyk 2019, Garric and Herbland 2020).
What is left unsaid is a central issue in “disenfranchised grief”
(Doka 1989), i.e. grief that is not recognised by society, and clearly
highlights the linguistic problem surrounding death. Two recent
linguistic research projects, Death Before Birth
(https://deathbeforebirthproject.wordpress.com) and PERINAT
(https://perinat.univ-lille.fr), on communication in the context of
perinatal death, have emerged from the observation that bereaved
parents encounter communication difficulties, which can manifest
themselves in silence on the part of the medical profession and of
relatives. In the face of silence, the reappropriation of language
constitutes a key component in comprehending and acknowledging one's
grief, and the issue of death more generally. With this workshop, our
aim is to explore this question and to open up a discussion on the
discursive representations of death and bereavement in order to
facilitate communication around the sensitive subject of death. This
appropriation of language can take a variety of forms, both
conventional and creative, such as by means of metaphors or through
lexical formations (Lemmens et al. 2021, Caliendo and Ruchon 2020) and
semantic shifts in designating terms.
This workshop will be informed by the following research questions:
what are the linguistic representations of death and end of life? What
are the similarities and differences between healthcare practitioners,
patients and (bereaved) relatives in terms of their representation of
death and end of life? To what extent can HCPs’ communication
practices impact the process of bereavement? What linguistic resources
can be put in place to avoid the silence that surrounds death-related
topics? To answer these questions, we seek to initiate an
interdisciplinary discussion by convening linguists along with
scholars from other disciplines with an interest in language, such as
philosophy or psychology, who share a common interest in end-of-life,
death and bereavement issues. A variety of methods will be adopted,
including corpus-, interview-, and questionnaire-based methods, in
order to observe the representation of death-related issues at various
levels of the linguistic analysis, such as morphological, lexical, or
discursive.
If you are interested in this workshop, you can submit an abstract (in
English or in French) no later than March 30, 2025, on EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=llcd2025
Abstracts must clearly state the title, the research questions,
approach, method, data and (expected) results. They must be anonymous:
not only must they not contain the presenters' names, affiliations or
addresses, but they must avoid any other information that might reveal
their author(s). They should not exceed 500 words (including examples,
but excluding bibliographical references). Each submission is subject
to three reviews. Abstracts submitted for workshops will be assessed
by two members of the Scientific Committee and (one of) the workshop
organizer(s).



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