Linguistic taboo has been relegated for a long time to a peripheral position within Linguistics
due to its social stigmatization and inherent linguistic complexity. Recently though there
has been a renewed interest in revisiting the phenomenon especially from cognitive frameworks.
This volume is the first collection of papers dealing with linguistic taboo from that
perspective. The volume gathers 15 chapters which provide novel insights into a broad range of
taboo phenomena (euphemism dysphemism swearing political correctness coprolalia etc.) from
the fields of sexuality diseases death war ageing or religion. With a special focus on
lexical semantics the authors in the volume work within Cognitive Linguistics frameworks such
as conceptual metaphor and metonymy cultural conceptualization or cognitive sociolinguistics
but also at the interface of pragmatics discourse analysis applied linguistics cognitive
science or psychiatry. This volume provides theoretical reflections and case studies based on
new methods and data from varied languages (English Spanish Polish Dutch Persian Gikuyu
and Egyptian Arabic). As such it moves towards a new generation of linguistic taboo studies.
