A Comparative Study Of Death Euphemisms In China And Japan

The euphemism exists generally in language and plays an important part in coordinating the interpersonal relationship. It’s a kind of special language phenomenon which is used to adapt the traditional culture standard, the manners and customs and people’s psychological need. The expresser did not speak frankly about their original intentions, but selected other words to express their meanings.Although both Chinese experts and Japanese experts have made great achievements in the study of euphemism in their own languages, the study of Japanese death euphemism is not enough. Especially the study on the comparison of Chinese and Japanese death euphemism is rare. Compared to other languages, the imbalance is serious. The Dream of Red Mansions which is regarded as an encyclopedia of Chinese culture, includes a large quantity of euphemism. I sort out the definition of euphemism by senior experts, and classify and summarize the relevant research. The corpus of this study includes The Dream of Red Mansions which was annotated by China Art Research Institute and published in December 1996 by People’s Literature Publishing House. In this paper, I sort out the death euphemism in The Dream of Red Mansions and Chinese-Japanese translation. I analyze the similarities and differences in the ways of expression, composition and cultural connotation of the death euphemism in Chinese and Japanese and deeply reveal and contrast the cultural information behind them.This paper is divided into six parts. The introduction part briefly introduces the purpose of research, the meaning of research, and previous studies. The main content has four chapters. In the second chapter, I comb the definition of death euphemism in Chinese and Japanese, and make a comparison between them. In the third chapter, I introduce the general situation of the death euphemism of the Dream of Red Mansions and its translation methods. Then I analyze and compare the similarities and differences of death euphemism in Chinese and Japanese from the aspects of quantity and pattern of expression. In the fourth chapter, I analyze and compare the similarities and differences of death euphemism in Chinese and Japanese in terms of lexical structure and grammatical structure. The fifth chapter state the similarities and differences of death euphemism in Chinese and Japanese from the view of political system, religious beliefs, age, gender, funeral customs and values to see the cultural connotation which is mirrored by death euphemism. The last part is the conclusion, which summarizes the paper, and puts forward the research topics in the future.I expect that this study can contribute to the study of euphemism and Redology, and arouse the attention of scholars in the study of contrastive study of euphemism between Chinese and Japanese.