In this paper we shall discuss the semantics of the lexical items which have been employed with reference to nakedness. The theoretical framework adopted in this article is that of cognitive linguistics, whose emergence in the second half of the 20th century gave a new impetus to semantic research. In particular, we shall discuss the words which denoted nakedness in the past, but which fell into oblivion (e.g. unbehelod, nscrȳdd), we shall also focus on the similes (e.g. as naked as a jaybird, naked as a robin, naked as a worm, naked as a needle) as well as the phrases and idioms (e.g. mother naked, belly naked, in the buff, in stag, in the altogether, in the nude, in one’s birthday suit, in a state of nature, in the raw) which pertain to the conceptual category NAKEDNESS. Furthermore, we attempt to answer the following research questions: (1) What processes are the most productive in terms of creating new synonyms of nakedness? (2) How many metaphorical schemas can be formulated on the basis of the analysis? (3) How many and which conceptual domains play a crucial role in the rise of the new lexical items whose senses are connected with the conceptual category NAKEDNESS?

English textbook authors generally take the “safe”, conventional approach’ to their topics. Meant to appeal to a heterogeneous, globalized market, textbooks avoid taboo and conflict, thus excluding broad areas of deeply universal human experiences. Using the example of “death” as an obvious “taboo” subject, this paper discusses the potential value of addressing controversial issues in language classrooms, as they encourage authentic communication and involvement.

This article is a description and comparison of Polish and Arabic taboo-based intensifiers in terms of both the semantic domains from which they are derived and their level of desemanticization. For this objective, four domains were selected: (1) death, (2) religion, God, and demons, (3) sexuality, and (4) family. Within those domains an array of linguistic forms were analysed with the aim of examining to what extent they retained traces of the original meaning. Another question to elucidate is whether the transition from one category to another in the process of semantically-driven grammaticalization is accompanied by the loss of the taboo element of these lexemes.

According to the Bible, a disrespectful use of God’s name may be perceived as blasphemous or at least profane. In order to avoid the risk of violating that religious and linguistic taboo, sensitive language users representing the Judeo-Christian world have developed various euphemistic ways of referring to God. On the other hand, however, jokes that include God’s name and laugh at him are not uncommon in Western culture. Assuming a linguistic-semantic perspective, the present paper examines a group of “God jokes”, which are jokes that contain God’s name and were tagged with the word god in the collection entitled “The best god jokes”, published on the website unijokes.com. The aim of the study is to identify the place and role of God’s name in the semantic script of “God jokes”, or in other words, to check “how much” God there really is in the text of jokes that are supposed to laugh at God, potentially violating the religious taboo. Following the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Raskin and Attardo 1991; Attardo 2001), the use of God’s name is analyzed in the knowledge resources of the semantic script of a joke: the target, the script opposition, the situation, the narration, and the language.

This paper discusses the question of how the old Kazakh custom of the ban on uttering the name of a husband and his male relatives by his wife is still observed in modern Kazakhstan. To do this, material from five main regions of Kazakhstan (North, South, Central, East and West) was collected and analysed. The study aims to do a sociolinguistic analysis of the result of the questionnaire. Although this old tradition is well known and described a long time ago by such researchers as Nikolaj Ilminskii, Nikolaj Grodekov, Ybyraı Altynsarın, Grigorij Potanin, Aleksandr Samoilovich and others, no modern fieldwork was done to check whether this tradition is still alive and how it changes. As is known, present-day Kazakhstan had changed significantly since the 19th century, when Ilminskii first studied the Kazakh language and traditions, Wilhelm Radloff and the researchers mentioned earlier, who were linguists and explorers. However, many cultures are still observed. As Grodekov noted, the avoiding of the pronunciation of a husband’s name and his male relatives by his wife is familiar to the Kazakhs and Kirghiz. Somoilovich, basing on Mustafa Shoqaı’s materials, devoted a paper to this question. Perhaps the best story was related by Altynsarın, who has registered an anecdote how a woman who went to bring water and saw a wolf killing an ewe rushed back to her house and shouted for help, transforming the words ‘lake’, ‘reed’, ‘wolf’, ‘sheep’ and ‘knife’, since her husband and his male relatives bore names composed of these words.

This essay deals with, or rather attempts to explore, the problem of irony and humour (sensu largo) in the Bible. On the whole Polish theology, homiletics and academic biblical studies have hardly anything to say about it, and when they do mention it, it is done in a rather perfunctory and unsatisfactory manner. This article asks what may be reasons for this ‘exegetical retouch’ (tabooing?), i.e. why has the question of biblical irony, which is a staple of international scholarship, received so little attention in Poland? Why do contemporary Polish biblical and homiletic studies cultivate a staid and solemn tone, and steer clear of a direct and plain exposition laced with subtle irony and a touch of asteism, a sure sign of a wise sense of humour that characterizes ancient Judaism? For Gary Webster, Terri Bednarz and Yehuda Radday the recognition level of biblical humour, sophisticated wordplay or irony depends on the reader’s competence, his linguistic and cultural sensitivity, his ability to detect cognitive presuppositions, and his knowledge of relevant contexts. Yet even a thorough understanding of the biblical text and its cultural conditioning cannot rule out doubts, moot points and interpretative dilemmas that bedevil the work of every translator and hermeneutic analyst and stoke up unending debates.

In this paper, a parallel multi-path variant of the well-known TSAB algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem is proposed. Coarse-grained parallelization method is employed, which allows for great scalability of the algorithm with accordance to Gustafon’s law. The resulting P-TSAB algorithm is tested using 162 well-known literature benchmarks. Results indicate that P-TSAB algorithm with a running time of one minute on a modern PC provides solutions comparable to the ones provided by the newest literature approaches to the job shop scheduling problem. Moreover, on average P-TSAB achieves two times smaller percentage relative deviation from the best known solutions than the standard variant of TSAB. The use of parallelization also relieves the user from having to fine-tune the algorithm. The P-TSAB algorithm can thus be used as module in real-life production planning systems or as a local search procedure in other algorithms. It can also provide the upper bound of minimal cycle time for certain problems of cyclic scheduling.

The communication aspect of cross-border healthcare and translation and interpreting in this field are under-researched. This paper presents the results of a qualitative webpage content analysis of the multilingual websites of three Viennese abortion clinics. We investigate if and how content affected by a social and cultural taboo is (re)framed linguistically in versions addressed at patients from Poland, where abortion has been largely illegal since 1993. Our results show that awareness of the need for comprehensive target group-oriented information provision and quality translation and/or adaptation varies and that the Polish websites in our corpus tend to adopt a slightly different, more feminist and pro-choice point-of-view in comparison to the German versions.

Precepts and taboos play a central role in the systematization of Daoist communities. On this set of rules hinges the development of various Daoist movements and the establishment of different Daoist schools. In this article, I investigate the proscriptions about the five pungent vegetables (wuxin 五辛 or wuhun 五葷, allium vegetables) consumption in Daoist early medieval prescription’s texts. Whereas previous scholarship has analyzed the influence of Buddhism in Daoist monastic rules, this paper turns the attention to the way in which the five pungent vegetables taboo was elaborated in Daoist discourse, especially in texts from the early medieval era. It argues that in Daoist prescription’s texts, the allium vegetables taboo is supported and justified by the aversive emotion of disgust. By describing the five pungent vegetables as polluted, defiled and even dangerous items, Daoist texts construct the perfect condition for their repulsion and the taboo's final systematization.