Taboo: Verbal Practices

Consideration of verbal taboo provides perspectives upon the relation of linguistic and nonlinguistic practices in the structuring of communicative situations in ways that directly index elements of them as special or attention-worthy; the kinds of repertoires or registers (Agha, 1999) involved, both linguistic and other, within languages as well as interlingually, and in spoken as compared with written forms; the kinds of sociocultural dimensions and identities that attract this sort of treatment; issues of the social distribution, dissemination and contraction, persistence or obsolescence over time, of the usages involved; the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic similarities and differences between taboo and ordinary speech forms; and the role of verbal taboo in language change. Certain kinds of denotational relationships, topographic and other situational factors, and associated kinds of activities regularly attract systematic taboo enregisterment cross-culturally.