2. Literature Review

The importance of taboos has been studying for a long time. Early researches have been done from many different perspectives. Published in 1967, the book Taboo, truth, and religion by Franz Baermann Steiner is one of the most important early researches on this issue. Steiner conducted a very comprehensive research on taboos to find the origin of the word "taboo" and its cognates. He clarifies the meaning of the taboo in Polynesia, its significance and functions in Polynesian religion and its relation to anthropological and psychological theories as well. Since 1960s, the importance of linguistic taboo has been observed by many sociolinguists when exploring the relationship between language and society. Discussions on this topic can be found in a lot of influential works, such as the work Sociolinguistics by R.A.Hudson. In this book, Hudson defined the social value of taboo words as a matter of convention and suggested that the whole area of taboo and semi-taboo language merit serious research by sociolinguists who should tell us a lot about language in relation to society (Hudson,1996:263). In China, Chen Yuan’s Sociolinguistics partially focuses on linguistic taboos. The 15th chapter of the book deals with taboos in particular. In the late mid-1980s, some scholars in China proposed to develop Chinese Cultural Linguistics. As a result, a series of relative books were published. In these books, taboos are unavoidably included. Around 1970s, when the first journal in the field of taboos in intercultural communication, MALEDICTA ( the International Journal of Verbal Aggression) emerged, people’s interest in taboo phenomenon began to grow. In 1997, into existence came another book entitled Don't Do It: A Dictionary of the Forbidden by Philip Thody. In this book, Thody clarified how people used taboos in different ages, in different societies and in everyday life.