Strategies for managing verbal taboos in contemporary witness interviews with victims of National Socialist persecution

Abstract

The article focuses on verbal taboos and communication strategies for their management in autobiographical interviews with victims of National Socialist persecution. Verbal taboos are interpreted here as concepts that exclude their explicit verbalization. In the course of study, it was possible to identify two main groups of verbal taboos actualized in this type of discourse. The first group relates to the traumatic experience of the respondents’ persecution. This suggests that taboos are managed through implementing silence and euphemization strategies. The second group refers to the verbalization of negative emotions caused by traumatic experiences. For this group of taboos, a face-saving strategy stands for the most relevant one. From the above analysis, a key finding emerged: an effective tool for implementing both strategies is the speech act of hinting – a discursive speech interaction between the addresser and the addressee, whereby they construct an intended implicit proposition.