The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Death

Dariusz Galasinski, Justyna Ziólkowska

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350302020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An essential reference to the intersection of language and death and dying, this book presents an overview of the methodologies, current debates, history and future of research in language-related death studies.

Adopting a highly interdisciplinary approach, the book explores a wide variety of phenomena and contexts of death and dying, examining language and discourse from linguistic, psychological, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives, among others. Divided into three parts, it considers three viewpoints from which death and dying can be understood: first-person, second-person, and third-person. The chapters cover an extensive array of topics, from presentations of death within social media and news reports, through to specific contexts of dying and types of death, including palliative care, assisted dying, suicide, and COVID-19. They also engage with data from across a range of national, cultural, and linguistic contexts, offering a broad international perspective.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction The Language of Death and Dying: State of the Ar
• PART ONE Personal Experiences of Death
• CHAPTER ONE The Good Death
• CHAPTER TWO The Identification of Linguistic Markers of Suicidal Ideation on Social Media: Computational and Corpus Approaches
• CHAPTER THREE ‘There Are No Words’: Designating Infant Loss through the Lens of Situated Discourse Analysis1
• CHAPTER FOUR The Sociolinguistics of Dying, Death and Mourning: Sharing Small Stories of Cancer in Digital Contexts
• CHAPTER FIVE Representation of Death in COVID-19 memorials
• CHAPTER SIX Corpse Poetry, Dead Bodies and Linguistic Survival in Suicide
• PART TWO Death from a Professional Perspective
• CHAPTER SEVEN Communicating Death in Intensive Care: The Impact of Longitudinal Family Interactions on Breaking the News
• CHAPTER EIGHT Psychiatrists, Suicide and Clinical Communication
• CHAPTER NINE Medicalized or Criminalized? Gendered Constructions of Killers Within Legal and Psychiatric Narratives
• CHAPTER TEN Telling of Killing: The Discursive Construction of Morality in Accounts of Taking Life
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Discursive Perspectives on Assisted Dying
• CHAPTER TWELVE Assisted Dying: Mapping the Terrain
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Language of Suicide
• PART THREE Public Representations of Death
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN Death and the Sacred in the Digital Age
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Talking About Death to Young Children: The Metaphorical Representation of Death in Children’s Literature
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Death in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Dementia, Death and Discourse
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Intersecting Discourses of Death and the Climate Crisis
• CHAPTER NINETEEN Freezing Death: Cryopreservation as a Challenge to the Inevitability of Death
• INDEX