36.3214, Calls: Lexique - "Special Issue: Language, End of Life, Death, and Bereavement" (Jrnl)

Thu Oct 23 09:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3214. Thu Oct 23 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3214, Calls: Lexique - "Special Issue: Language, End of Life, Death, and Bereavement" (Jrnl)

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Date: 22-Oct-2025
From: Océane Foubert [oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr]
Subject: Lexique - "Special Issue: Language, End of Life, Death, and Bereavement" (Jrnl)

Journal: Lexique
Issue: Language, End of Life, Death, and Bereavement

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; Boltanski 2004; Molinié
2006; Clavandier 2009; Despret 2015; Boltanski 2004). In linguistics,
research has addressed issues related to representations of death and
other associated topics 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 et al. 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 or fixed expressions, such as garden of remembrance or
rest in peace, or at the level of metaphorical expressions,
corresponding to the death is sleep or death is loss, among others.
The use of these euphemistic devices to refer to death has been
studied in different traditional written genres, such as obituaries
(Crespo-Fernández 2006), epitaphs (Crespo-Fernández 2023), but also in
fictional work such as TV series (Jamet 2010).
In addition to studies that focus specifically on the representation
of death as a taboo subject, 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, (bereaved) relatives, and the communication between
them. Here too, metaphors are often studied to see how they are used,
and how they can both facilitate and hinder communication and
well-being (Semino et al. 2018; Littlemore and Turner 2020).
Unlike linguistic studies of representations of death, end-of-life and
bereavement have received little attention from a lexical point of
view. However, the lexicon is at the heart of discussions related to
bereavement, particularly when it comes to “disenfranchised grief”
(Doka 1989), i.e. grief that is not recognised by society, such as
perinatal grief (Norwood 2021; Caliendo 2024).
This lack of recognition is reflected in the absence of a specific
term to refer to bereaved parents and their babies. To counter this
lexical gap, parents have coined lexical innovations to name
themselves and their babies (Ruchon 2015; Caliendo & Ruchon 2020).
These initiatives are related to the notion of hypostatisation, which
is the idea that “the existence of a particular word creates the
impression that there is a corresponding thing or entity to which the
word refers” (Schmid 2008: 5). By means of these lexical formations,
bereaved parents not only hypostatise their identities but also
re-enfranchise them. In addition to a neological perspective, the
representation of perinatal bereavement has also been addressed from
the perspective of terminology, by analysing changes in medical
language, and reproductive health terminology more specifically
(Malory 2022).
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 special issue, our aim is to
explore this question and to open up a discussion on the lexical
representations of death and bereavement in order to facilitate
communication around the sensitive subject of death. 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 the lexical level.
Practical Information:
 - Language of publication: English or French
 - Instructions for authors: https://www.peren-revues.fr/lexique/793
 - Calendar:
21 November: abstract submission (300-500 words, bibliography
excluded, 3-5 keywords) to be sent to giuditta.caliendo at univ-lille.fr;
oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr; catherine.ruchon at univ-lille.fr
2 December: notification of acceptance
31 March: initial article submission to be sent to
giuditta.caliendo at univ-lille.fr; oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr;
catherine.ruchon at univ-lille.fr
31 May: reviewers' feedback
15 July: revised version
December 2026: Publication of the special issue
Keywords: linguistic representations of death and end of life,
bereavement, taboo, euphemism, lexicon, terminology
Giuditta Caliendo, STL, Université de Lille,
giuditta.caliendo at univ-lille.fr
Océane Foubert, STL, Université de Lille, oceane.foubert at univ-lille.fr
Catherine Ruchon, STL, Université de Lille,
catherine.ruchon at univ-lille.fr
References:
Allan, K., & Burridge, K. (2006). Forbidden words: Taboo and the
censoring of language. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617881
Aries, P. (1977). L’homme devant la mort. Seuil.
Auriac-Slusarczyk, E. (2019). Introduction. Les discours entre
soignants et patients. Études contemporaines en Sciences Humaines et
Sociales. Éducation, santé, sociétés, 5(2), 7-19.
Baudry, P. (1999). La place des morts : Enjeux et rites. Armand Colin.
Biseko, J. M. (2024). Cultural echoes: linguistic insights into death
and afterlife in the Swahili language. Cogent Arts &
Humanities, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2024.2414608
Boltanski, L. (2004). La condition fœtale. Une sociologie de
l’engendrement et de l’avortement. Gallimard, Essais.
Caliendo, G. (2024). The Narrative Turn in Healthcare and its
Implications on the Experience of Perinatal Grief,  Altre Modernità,
32, 17-34.
Caliendo, G., & Ruchon, C. (2020). La nomination des enfants décédés
en bas-âge et de leurs parents. D’une analyse du discours située à une
linguistique d’intervention. SHS Web of Conferences, 78.
https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20207801019
Clavandier, G. (2009). Sociologie de la mort : Vivre et mourir dans la
société contemporaine. Armand Colin.
Crespo-Fernández, E. (2006). The language of death: Euphemism and
conceptual metaphorization in Victorian obituaries. SKY Journal of
Linguistics, 19, 101-130.
Crespo-Fernández, E. (2023). The death taboo: Euphemism and metaphor
in epitaphs from the English cemetery of Malaga, Spain. Languages, 8.
https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages8030215
Despret, V. (2015). Au bonheur des morts : Récits de ceux qui restent.
La Découverte.
Drew, P., & Heritage J. (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in
institutional settings. Cambridge University Press.
Gatambuki, M., Ruiming G.,  Manqiong Shen W., Tirado C.,
Tsaregorodtseva O.,  Khatin-Zadeh O.,  Minervino R., Fernando
Marmolejo-Ramos (2018). A cross-linguistic study of metaphors of
death. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 5(2), 359-375.
Jamet, D. (2010). Euphemisms for death: Reinventing reality through
words?. In Sorlin. S. (Ed.), Inventive linguistics. Presses
Universitaires du Languedoc et de la Méditerranée.
Littlemore, J., Turner, S. (2020). Metaphors in communication about
pregnancy loss. Metaphor and the Social World. Vol. 10: 1, 45–75.
Malory, B. (2022). The transition from abortion to miscarriage to
describe early pregnancy loss in British medical journals: A
prescribed or natural lexical change? Medical Humanities, 48, 489–496.
https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012373
Molinié, M. (2006). Soigner les morts pour guérir les vivants. Les
Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Norwood, T. (2021). Metaphor and Neonatal Death: How Stories Can Help
When a Baby Dies at Birth, Life Writing, 18(1), 113-124.
Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Hardie, A., Payne, S., & Rayson, P.
(2018). Metaphor, cancer and the end of life: A corpus-based study.
Routledge.
Thomas, L-V. (1975). Anthropologie de la mort. Payot.
Xin, X. (2021). La mort et ses euphémismes : analyse contrastive entre
les langues chinoise et française dans la perspective théorique du
registre de Halliday. Synergies Chine, 16. 171-186.

Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography
                     Morphology
                     Semantics
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     French (fra)

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