Taboos and euphemisms in foreign language conversations

This chapter discusses the relation between taboos and euphemistic expressions, that is, how participants in the context of conversations in a foreign language construct their utterances when a topic, expression, or word they have in mind needs to be toned down. The aims were: (1) to examine when this choice is made and (2) to describe the ways in which the construction of euphemisms occurs. The data used consists of the video recordings of two interactions. The first one is between two Brazilian colleagues speaking English as a foreign language (hereinafter FL), and the second one is among four students from France and from Germany, speaking Portuguese as a lingua franca. In both interactions, the participants talk about sexuality, homophobia, death, financial status, and religion. Once the conversations were recorded, we transcribed both the visual and verbal aspects of the data. Our findings show that in talk-in-interaction, euphemistic occurrences go beyond mere word substitution, comprising other linguistic resources, such as reported speech, and semiotic resources, such as manual and facial gestures, laughter, i.e., the use of humour as a coping mechanism.