Workshop at the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS)

Date: 24 - 27 February 2026

Location: Trier, Germany

Contact: Natalie Verelst

Contact Email: natalie.verelst@tu-dortmund.de

Submission Deadline: 15 August 2025

Organisers (all TU Dortmund): Natalie Verelst, Christian Zimmer, Jones Anam, Lena Jubelius

Invited Speakers:

• Natalia Levshina (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, NL)
• Nils Langer (Europa-Universität Flensburg, DE)

Call for Papers

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Description

Linguistic avoidance arises in contexts where language users either choose not to, cannot, or are not permitted to use certain forms directly – due to individual preferences, institutional constraints, or social norms. Avoidance may require a certain degree of metalinguistic awareness on the part of the language user and can sometimes be linked to taboo (cf. Allan & Burridge 2006). Numerous examples from various contexts show how it may impact language on different levels: structural effects emerge in the phonemisation of click consonants in Nguni languages, where taboo lexical items were replaced by borrowings containing clicks (Irvine & Gal 2000); avoidance is a key strategy in mitigating face threats in politeness (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987); strategies like algospeak (e.g., k!ll for kill) aim to circumvent algorithmic context moderation online; politically correct language use is a prominent example, including gender-neutral forms as alternatives to gendered expressions (e.g., German Studierende for Studenten und Studentinnen or Student*innen ‘students’); avoidance shapes naming practices: vegan or vegetarian food names often allude to, but do not explicitly name animal products (e.g., Visch for vegetarian “fish”, whereby <v> carries a conventionalised meaning) to sidestep food-labelling regulations (De Wilde 2024); certain proper names may be replaced by alternatives such as lexemes, pronouns, or initials for various reasons (Nübling 2023), and grammatical taboo describes the avoidance of specific grammatical structures in a certain register (Vogel 2018).

While avoidance in pragmatics and semantics has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to its structural dimensions and the specific linguistic forms that arise from it. This raises a number of open research questions, including but not limited to: - What linguistic patterns emerge through avoidance, and to what extent do these alternative structures become conventionalised or systematised within a language? How do processes of avoidance affect language change? - In which contexts – whether social, institutional, or psychological – is direct communication restricted, discouraged, or impossible, and how do avoidance strategies relate to the underlying reasons for avoidance? - How do language users interact with avoided content? What attitudes and/or ideologies are associated with avoidance practices, how is meaning negotiated, and how (if at all) is it reflected metalinguistically in the absence of direct expression? - To what extent do avoidance practices differ across languages, registers, or modalities, and what does this reveal about the interface between linguistic structure, usage, and sociocultural constraints? This workshop is open to contributions on any language or multiple languages, and it explicitly welcomes linguists working in different areas (grammar, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics etc.). Presentations will be 20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion, and they will be given in English.

References:

Allan, Keith & Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden words. Taboo and the censoring of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Penelope & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

De Wilde, Truus. 2024. Naming strategies for vegetarian and vegan food. Presented at the Germanic Sandwich 9, Lancaster University, UK.

Irvine, Judith T. & Susan Gal. 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Nübling, Damaris. 2023. Verweigerte Referenz? Was es bedeutet, Namen nicht in den Mund zu nehmen. Beiträge zur Namenforschung 58(1/2). 229–254.

Vogel, Ralf. 2018. Sociocultural Determinants of Grammatical Taboos in German. In Liudmila Liashchova (ed.), The Explicit and the Implicit in Language and Speech, 116–153. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.