Conceiving of a Linguistics of Death (Research Note)
Though death and dying are central to the human experience, linguists have never applied their science to explain the linguistic and communicative phenomena that occur at or around deathbeds. A set of informal interviews with linguists offers insight into why linguists have ignored it: the difficulty of obtaining data, funding challenges, and other difficulties navigating the modern research enterprise; taboos surrounding death and dying as a topic; and lack of experience with dying. A sketch of the history of linguistics argues for another reason: the field is fundamentally oriented towards origins and beginnings, and in contemporary linguistics the gravity of theoretical battles concern language acquisition.