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An aging demographic in Western societies as well as globally has made public health issues, such as dementia, subject to hyperbolic metaphor such as “tsunami” and “time bomb.” This chapter reviews the state of knowledge regarding language, sexualities, aging, and chronic illness. In particular, the discussion focuses on discursive research from across the social sciences that furthers understandings of older people’s lives and experiences. The chapter highlights research that has focused on ageism and chronic conditions impacting older people (specifically, dementia and type 2 diabetes), including empirical research on these conditions, and on manifestations of heterosexism and heteronormativity in these contexts. Using illustrative examples that emphasize the intersection of discourse and issues that relate to aging, the chapter foregrounds this area as an important element of language and sexuality scholarship. Last, future directions for the development of research focusing on these topics are indicated.

This article critically evaluates the notion of contrast and discusses the role that contrast has been claimed to have in grammar. It argues that a precise understanding of grammatical effects of contrast can only be gained if both the contrastive constituents with the kind of alternative set they evoke as well as the discourse relations that connect the discourse segments containing the contrastive constituents are subjected to detailed analysis for their effects on grammar (prosody, morphosyntax). It presents three hypotheses specifying the details for the identification of (a) contrast-related alternative formation, (b) contrastive discourse relations, and (c) grammatical manifestations of contrast. It reviews previous research on contrast in relation to these hypotheses, examining the linguistic materials that have been used to elicit grammatical manifestations of contrast, and discussing specific findings for particular languages from the prosodic and the morphosyntactic literature on contrast.

This chapter describes and illustrates a conversation analytic approach to language and sexuality. It begins by exploring contrasts between conversation analytic and other approaches to connecting language as a practice and sexuality as an identity topic. This discussion is set in a broader ethnomethodological context, drawing out key themes and debates that have emerged since the inception of ethnomethodological approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in the 1960s, including notions such as “doing” gender and sexuality and “passing.” The chapter then briefly reviews the controversial debates about the analytic tractability of identity topics, like sexuality and gender, in the conversation analytic tradition. After summarizing conversation analytic work on sexuality specifically, an illustration of what this approach offers to language and sexuality scholars is given, showing the methodological steps involved as well as the possibilities for applying findings in the real world beyond scholarly debate.

Corpus linguistics involves the use of computer software to aid the analysis of language data, in some cases up to billions of words of text. Techniques like frequency lists, keyword lists, collocates, and concordancing can be used to identify linguistic patterns that humans might otherwise overlook. This chapter demonstrates how corpus methods have been applied to research on language and sexuality, enabling both examination of language usage and representation of sexual identities and practices. This is followed by a case study that considers changing press discourses in the United Kingdom concerning a gay professional football player, Justin Fashanu. The study compares two corpora of newspaper articles, collected before and after Fashanu’s suicide in 1998. Analysis reveals the ways in which Fashanu was negatively represented as a result of his sexuality, from a criminal who allegedly “sodomized” a 17 year-old against his will to an emblematic victim of a prejudiced society.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of focus projection: a sentence with prosodic marking of focus on a word can lead to ambiguity, in that different constituents containing the word can be interpreted as focused. Two general approaches to focus projection are compared. In Default Prosody analyses, focus projection is epiphenomenal, a consequence of general principles requiring that focus be prosodically prominent, coupled with default principles of default prominence. In the F-projection approach, focus projection is encoded more directly, in terms of licensing rules for F-marking on constituents. Overall, the evidence in the literature favors the Default Prosody approach, and this chapter concentrates on comparing these two general approaches, as well as briefly summarizing other aspects of focus projection. The chapter ends with discussion of Basque data that are problematic for widely assumed generalizations about focus projection, and a possible way of understanding the data in the Default Prosody approach.

This chapter discusses the cartographic approach to clause structure according to which information structure directly relates to syntactic heads that project within the clausal left periphery. This view is supported by data from languages in which information-structure-sensitive notions (e.g. topic, focus) are encoded by means of discourse markers that trigger various constituent displacement rules. Such empirical facts are compatible with the cartographic view in which lexical choices condition information packaging and clause structure. Put together, the cross-linguistic data presented in this chapter indicate that [FOCUS], [TOPIC], and [INTERROGATIVE] represent formal features that are properties of lexical elements and may sometimes trigger generalized-piping and snowballing movement.

This chapter highlights the role of the concept of normativity in language and sexuality studies. It is argued that normativity has played a central role in this field, even if as a largely undertheorized concept. The theoretical discussion of normativity is advanced by conceptualizing norms as discursive formations and by distinguishing prescriptive from descriptive norms as well as normative mechanisms on the social micro-level from those on the social macro-level. Central patterns that are involved in the discursive construction of various sexual normativity types are outlined, namely heteronormativity (i.e., the notion that a particular version of heterosexuality is natural or preferable), homonormativity (i.e., normative notions of how gay men and lesbian women are supposed to be), and other sexual normativities. The concluding section discusses potential agendas for language and sexuality scholars in terms of changes in sexual normativities.

This chapter discusses the relationship between language and sexual politics. It focuses on the ways language is used to police membership in different gendered and sexual groups, to construct self and others along gendered and sexual lines, and to negotiate belonging in different communities and institutions. The first half of the chapter summarizes prominent research in this area. Topics covered include struggles over labeling practices, discursive constructions of sexual authenticities, and the role of language and sexuality in the creation and reproduction of national ideologies. The second half turns to a detailed case study of language and sexual politics among lesbians in Israel. The chapter describes how the women in question use particular linguistic practices, such as variation in Hebrew gender morphology, to construct distinct sexual selves, and, in the process, challenge prevailing sexual norms in Israel. The discussion also highlights future directions for language and sexuality research, focusing on the importance of an adequate theory of power.

While previous applied sociolinguistic scholarship has addressed language in a variety of medical and ability-related settings, and while there is now a growing body of research on concerns relating to language and sexuality, discussions about language, ability, and sexuality remain underinvestigated. Focusing on breast cancer, an ailment that affects a sexualized body part, this chapter discusses how patient and caregiver narratives (pathographies) around the condition have crucial implications for concerns about sexuality. In particular, the chapter addresses two metaprescriptive utterances (Lyotard 1984) related to the condition—amputation and prosthesis—with a view to showing how these medicalized terms are singularities that have the power to erase individual voices struggling with the disability of a sexualized body part. This chapter offers an exploration of these concerns to nuance current debates about identity shifts in the contexts of ability and sexuality, while also ushering in concerns about (dis)citizenship.

This chapter considers the relevance of cultural discourses to speakers’ indexing of recognizable “lesbian” identities. It begins with a discussion of the ideological discourses that lesbian women have been found to draw upon in their interactions, explaining key aspects of lesbian culture and experience. It then provides a survey of linguistic research into lesbian discourse, offering an account of the mostly Western studies conducted to date. A critical discussion of the prevalence of “butch” and “femme” identities is provided, with the inclusion of data from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with a lesbian community of practice. The chapter demonstrates that these normative notions carry symbolic value in the construction of some lesbian identities, but also argues—through an account of studies looking at same-sex-identified women who identify with categories other than lesbian—for research that looks beyond the white, middle-class, Western women who so far dominate work in this area.

The chapter is concerned with discourse-analytic perspectives on lying and deception. Starting with an assertion that lying is linguistically uninteresting—there are no linguistic markers of lying—the chapter argues for an ‘all-linguistic’ account of deception. Data consisting of an act of communication and a misrepresentational communication overcome the issue of ‘real-life’ corpora for deception research. A typology of acts deception based on this approach is offered: falsifications (stereotypical lies), distortions (assertions stronger or weaker than the original), and ‘taking words out of context’ (ascribing a different function to what was said). The chapter ends with an application of the typology in an analysis of clinical notes.

The chapter provides an overview of the interaction between quantification and information-structural properties, especially focus, givenness, and topic. While quantification affects truth conditions, information-structuring devices can have an effect on the interpretation of quantificational expressions. After a short introduction to the nature of quantification, the chapter covers the main areas where such effects have been identified, in particular in adverbial quantification, in generic clauses, in conditional sentences, and in sentences with nominal (or determiner) quantification, including intersective determiners and comparative determiners like most. It reviews different theoretical proposals how this sensitivity to information-structural categories arises, in particular whether they are related to focus or givenness. It also discusses cases in which the quantifier itself is topical, given, or focused.

Rituals, symbols, art forms, and narratives devoted to celebrating and reflecting upon the meanings of romantic love have existed throughout time and across cultural spaces. Deciphering those meanings concerns semiotics, the science of interpretation. This chapter deals with the meanings of love as they present themselves in diverse representational forms across the world in order to understand what they tell us about love as a universal emotional phenomenon. The practices, symbols, and cultural texts derived from the feelings evoked by romantic love suggest, clearly, that it is more than a reaction to sexual instincts and urges. This is perhaps why love-based traditions have brought about social revolutions and have had effects on how we have evolved psychologically and culturally. The actual biological source of love remains a mystery, but we can unravel its raison d’être somewhat by understanding why it is so meaningful for all of us.

This chapter provides an overview of research on language and sexual stigma. Sexual stigma is defined as the sociolinguistic and psychological process by which a person or group’s physiological characteristics, cultural and linguistic practices, and/or identities become marked as polluted or taboo. The chapter suggests that sexual stigma tends to target those people or groups associated with practices felt to threaten ideologically normative social reproduction, which is encoded in conventions of linguistic markedness. Sexual stigma is linked to the fluid boundaries between grammatically encoded markedness and discursive indexicality as normative categories emerge in interpersonal encounters. The chapter addresses four key topics in the study of language and sexual stigma: sociolinguistic markedness; taboo and threats to ideologies of social reproduction; avoidance and indirection as strategies of linguistic containment of threats; and emergent sexualities.

This chapter offers a panorama of research on sexuality and translation, a promising field of research still underexamined. Two directions are identified: the translation of sexuality and the sexualization of translation. The cooperation between disciplines has generated a number of new areas of study, including erotic/pornographic translation, (self)censorship in translation, and gay/queer translation. These promising lines of inquiry are briefly presented, and a few examples of analyses are added. Though much more work is needed, the critical alliance of translation and sexuality seems to be offering valuable insights into the ideological construction of a given society, particularly into the endless (re)writings of sexual identities, desires, and pleasures. Whether they will constitute a proper interdiscipline—in terms of a common focus or methodologies—remains to be seen.

The chapter presents a general overview of several phenomena related to information structure in the Romance languages and varieties spoken in Europe and takes into account the left and the right side of the clause as the locus where information structure is encoded. The first part presents an overview of the syntactic and phonological properties of constructions like Hanging Topics, Left Dislocation, and fronted foci and of their pragmatic import as well as of the properties of constructions which occur on the right side of the clause (i.e. Right Dislocation, Marginalization, word order alternations, and focus). In the second part a general overview of syntactic and prosodic accounts proposed in the literature is provided with special attention to the problems each type of account raises with respect to the empirical domain considered.

This chapter reviews neurophysiological and neuroanatomical investigations of information structural notions, with a view to working towards a neurobiologically grounded perspective. It first considers components of a neurobiologically plausible theory of information structure and outlines candidate mechanisms for higher-order cognitive processing, namely prediction and mental modelling, attention orientation, memory, and inferencing. The chapter then proceeds to neuroscientific investigations of information structure, highlighting differences between sentence- and text-level processing and discussing findings for the information structural notions of givenness, focus, and topic, before presenting further insights from syntax-induced information structural effects. The chapter concludes with a discussion of neurobiological models of information structure processing.