Language, end of life, death, and bereavement: an interdisciplinary perspective / Langage, fin de vie, mort et deuil : une perspective interdisciplinaire ((Lexique 2026 Special Issue)

Date de tombée (deadline) : 21 Novembre 2025
À : Université de Lille

Publié le 24 Octobre 2025 par Marc Escola (Source : Catherine Ruchon)

Language, end of life, death, and bereavement: : an interdisciplinary perspective

(Lexique 2026 Special Issue)

Keywords: linguistic representations of death and end of life, bereavement, taboo, euphemism, lexicon, terminology

Coordination: Giuditta Caliendo, STL, Université de Lille, giuditta.caliendo@univ-lille.fr ; Océane Foubert, STL, Université de Lille, oceane.foubert@univ-lille.fr ; Catherine Ruchon, STL, Université de Lille, catherine.ruchon@univ-lille.fr

Presentation

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@univ-lille.fr; oceane.foubert@univ-lille.fr; catherine.ruchon@univ-lille.fr
2 December: notification of acceptance
31 March: initial article submission to be sent to giuditta.caliendo@univ-lille.fr ; oceane.foubert@univ-lille.fr; catherine.ruchon@univ-lille.fr
31 May: reviewers' feedback
15 July: revised version
December 2026: Publication of the special issue

References

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Baudry, P. (1999). La place des morts : Enjeux et rites. Armand Colin.

Boltanski, L. (2004). La condition fœtale. Une sociologie de l’engendrement et de l’avortement. Gallimard, Essais.

Biseko, J. M. (2024). Cultural echoes: linguistic insights into death and afterlife in the Swahili language. Cogent Arts & Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2024.2414608

Caliendo, G. (2024). The Narrative Turn in Healthcare and its Implications on the Experience of Perinatal Death, 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

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