Taboo Language and (Im)politeness in Early Modern English Drama

Fabio Ciambella

doi:10.6093/978-88-6719-295-3

Taboo Language and (Im)politeness in Early Modern English Drama

Authors

Fabio Ciambella

Sapienza Università di Roma

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6719-295-3

Keywords:

Taboo, (im)politeness, Pragmatics, Pragmalinguistics, Historical Pragmatics, Dysphemism, Insult, S-T words, SOTL, Renaissance Theatre, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Wycherley, Literary Pragmatics

Synopsis

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Argos. Studies in Argumentation, Pragmatics and Stylistics

Pages: 174

Language: English

Abstract: This volume focuses on insults and swear words. It does so through methodological frameworks specific to historical pragmatics, pragmalinguistics, cultural studies, and English historical linguistics, among others. Variously called S-T words, SOTL (Swearing, Offensive, and Taboo Language), or simply taboo language, insults and offences are the object of the analyses conducted in the five chapters of this edited collection, with the aim of shedding some light on the complex interweaving relationship between contemporary theories and early modern English language. This edited collection of essays consists of five chapters encompassing a time span from the late sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth. The case studies considered for the analyses carried out are early modern English plays. Although three of the chapters focus on Shakespearean texts, two of them offer insights into other playwrights’ use of taboo language. An afterword by Prof. Roberta Mullini follows the five chapters and closes the collection.

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Author Biography

Fabio Ciambella, Sapienza Università di Roma

Fabio Ciambella is researcher of English at Sapienza University of Rome. His privileged fields of research include the relationship between dance and early modern language, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, culinary linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition, topics about which he has published extensively. His book Dance Lexicon in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Corpus-based Approach (Routledge, 2021), is a corpus- based analysis of dance-related lexis in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His latest publications is a book about how to teach English pragmatics with Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2024).