Studies On Chinese Death Euphemism

Death, is the most frighted phenomenon of human being. In order to avoid the fear from directly discussing"death", people have created massive related words and expressions as we called--death euphemism. So far, the studies of death euphemism are mainly at the point of social linguistics to dig the humane conception and cultural psychology from this kind of euphemism. Also there are some scholars doing researches from the fields of pragmatics, linguistic cognition, linguistic philosophy,etc. Though it has been promoted to some extent, the author has found that there still exists large room for further researches.This article has intented to discover the humane conception and cultural psychology of chinese culture through the window of chinese death euphemism. It has experienced the idea of"by exploring the historic accretion in chinese culture, to construct the mode of chinese cultural value system". Based on this, the author here will do the researches from culture, sociology, social linguistics and many levels, by the methods of descripting and explaining, to give full details to chinese death euphemism. The author would try from some new angles as follow: first, giving plentiful details to the chinese death euphemism from angles of semantics, presenting contents, methods, and language fixing; second, giving a synthesized studies to the humane conception and cultural psychology in death euphemism; third, this article will do from the aspects of"metaphor of concrete natural things"and"metaphor of human activities"to propose a new view called as"metaphor endowed with conctrete things", which is the great feature in this essay.Most of the examples in this essay has been quoted from"Dictionary of Chinese Euphemism"(Zhang Gonggui is the editor-in-chief),and some of them are from many other articles.Studing along this researching direction, the author suppose that it can be promoted by the knowledge of cultural psychology and social culturology on details. It would embellish the exploration of"building the value system of chinese culture".