Speaking about sayability

Disability is still a big taboo topic. Taboos are not necessarily the most suitable subjects for linguistic investigation. Something that is not spoken about is difficult to study linguistically. Social media now reveal new approaches to taboo topics. They offer spaces in which limits of sayability are interactively tested, a very important step towards integration. A special project in this sense is the Blog 22Monate. Day after day, Mother Anne describes her life here with her seriously ill son Josef, who has become 22 months old. The corpus forms the basis for my lecture. I would like to concentrate in particular on the passages in which sayability is addressed and patterns are pointed out, which are possibly transferable to similar communicative practices.