摘 要

委婉语不仅是人们日常生活一种重要的交际手段，同时在语言学中也是一种重要的语言现象。它采用间接的、含蓄的语言表达来避讳那些令人难以启齿的话题如死亡、疾病等。死亡作为自然的生理现象，难以为人们所接受。因为这是一种无法逆转的生命终结。这些关于死亡的委婉语体现了人们对于死亡的恐惧和敬畏。因此在英语中，有许多对于死亡的委婉表达。这些关于死亡的委婉语体现了人们对死亡的恐惧和敬畏，同时折射出了西方语言文化的丰富性和多样性。在死亡委婉语中，人们会采用多种修辞手法来达到“委婉”的目的如转喻和隐喻等。随着认知语言学的发展，人们对于隐喻和转喻的认识已经不仅仅停留在了传统的修辞手法上，而是将它们看作是一种认知工具来更好的帮助我们理解这个世界，它实际上是人们生存主要的和最基本的认知方式。然而，目前对于死亡委婉语的研究大多都还停留在修辞学、词汇学、语义学、语用学等等，从其广泛的应用性和丰富性角度来看，这些研究还不是系统而完整的。因此本文将依据认知语言学的转喻和隐喻理论，进一步探究死亡委婉语的生成机制和本质，为相关的研究做出补充。并能更好地了解英语死亡委婉语以及其背后的文化。

关键词：英语死亡委婉语；概念隐喻；概念转喻

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Demonstration 3

2.1 Theoretical Foundation 3

2.1.1 Euphemism 3

2.1.2 Conceptual Metonymy 5

2.1.3 Conceptual Metaphor 6

2.2 A Metonymic Approach to English Death Euphemism 8

2.2.1 Metonymic Analysis in Death Euphemism 8

2.2.2 Classification 8

2.3 A Metaphorical Approach to English Death Euphemism 10

2.3.1 Metaphor Analysis in Death Euphemism 10

2.3.2 Classification 10

3. Conclusion 14

Works Sited..................................................................................................................16

Bibliography 17

A Study of English Death Euphemisms from the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy

1. Introduction

A euphemism is one of the most important ways to take the place of some words or expressions that may be found offensive or unpleasant. It also refers to taboo topics like death, diseases, sex, wars, crimes, ages and the like in a polite way. In the past, the researches of euphemism were mostly studied from the aspects of rhetoric devices, lexicography, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and pragmatics and so on. In the course of the recent years, with the development of cognitive linguistics, some scholars study the euphemism in the perspective of cognition. But, researches on euphemism from the cognitive point of view are not systematic and complete compared with its wide application.

Death is not only an irresistible physiological phenomenon but also an inevitable social phenomenon which people can’t avoid talking about it in the daily life. Literally, death indicates a human being or an animal loses the sign of life and is at the end of his destiny. Being faced with death, people will feel scared and painful. Some of the families and friends of the deceased are unwilling to accept the sorrowful truth. Therefore, death euphemisms, the mild and indirect expressions, emerge to replace some direct and unpleasant expressions and then relieve the grief to some extent.

In English culture, there are a variety of death euphemisms used in daily communication which are attracted much attention and concern in linguistic research. The previous studies of euphemisms are mostly from the aspects of rhetoric devices, lexicography, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and pragmatics and so on. With the development of cognitive linguistics, the researchers divert their attention to the cognitive perspective of death euphemisms. This paper is to analyze the death euphemisms from the perspective of metaphor and metonymy in the cognitive linguistics on the basis of the previous study.

The paper will make a detailed analysis of English death euphemisms from the perspective of two main cognitive theories mentioned above through analyzing the working mechanism and providing some categorization of English death euphemisms. Moreover, conceptual metonymy theory and conceptual metaphor theory are also introduced in this paper as the theoretical foundation.