A Corpus-based Study Of Diachronic Evolution Of The Metaphorical Usages Of English Death Euphemisms

English death euphemisms are expressions that intentionally avoid talking about death with the words such as “death”,“die” and “dying”.The euphemistic effect is mainly achieved through metaphors,which is not only a linguistic form but also a mirror to show how humans construal the world.The metaphorical usages of English death euphemisms are exactly the subjects of the research.Introspection and synchronic approaches are mainly adopted in the previous studies.Though scholars have been aware of the significance of historical corpus to address questions of the diachronic studies,few of them have employed corpus to analyze the diachronic evolution of metaphorical usages of English death euphemisms.As a result,in light of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson(2003),the author has utilized tools-Dictionary of Euphemisms(Holder 2008),Oxford English Dictionary online and Corpus of Historical American English(COHA)to address the following three research questions:(1)What are the types of English death euphemisms based on different source domains and how do different metaphorical usages of death euphemisms reflect different ways of conceptualization?(2)What are the characteristics of the diachronic evolution of the metaphorical usages of different types of English death euphemisms?(3)Why do the metaphorical usages of English death euphemisms evolve diachronically?Through the research,the main findings of the thesis are as follows.For the first research question,English death euphemisms have been classified into seven according to their different source domains.Based on the data in COHA,death can be conceptualized positively,neutrally or negatively.Positively,it can be considered as a happy release that is far from any worries and answering God’s summon.Neutrally,death can be conceptualized as losing the sensibility,losing a precious possession,leaving the present world and finishing the final activity.Negatively,it can be portrayed as entering a container.As for the characteristics of the diachronic evolution of the metaphorical usages of English death euphemisms,firstly,people no matter with religious belief or not are inclined to use “death as answering God’s summon” to conceptualize death,though the number is declining after the 1850 s.Secondly,the metaphorical usages of some English death euphemisms have changed significantly.Some of them lose their euphemistic meaning of death and back to their literal meanings or change to new meanings such as “death is answering God’s summon”,“death is losing the sensibility” and “death as a happy release”.Thirdly,the metaphorical usages of some English death euphemisms have been fluctuated over the decades such as“death is leaving the present world”,“death is losing precious possession” and “death as the final activity”.Fourthly,the metaphorical meaning of some English death euphemisms,particularly that construal death as entering a container,become oldfashioned and even the wasted word.For the last research question,the diachronic evolution is affected by both linguistic factors and extralinguistic events.Metaphorical usages of death euphemisms that can avoid misunderstandings and facilitate communication are more popular.Extralinguistic events such as changes in people’s cognition of death,changes in people’s fears of death,influences from religious belief,and the development of modern civilization also affected the diachronic evolution of the metaphorical usages of English death euphemisms.The study further proves that CMT can be applied to analyze taboo topics such as death.It also visualizes the diachronic evolution of the metaphorical usages of death euphemisms by showing their frequencies in different decades and thus shows the feasibility of a corpus to interpret the abstract concept.