“Death is the essence of all evil” – but not equally everywhere: Polish-English study on valuing and masking
-
Aleksandra Biela-Wołońciej
Abstract
This paper describes an English-Polish theoretical and empirical cognitive study of the axiological aspects of the concept(s) death/śmierć and conceptualizations to which they refer. The pragmatic tool of a language mask is presented and applied to death, a generally difficult topic. A two-part survey was conducted to test the valuing of expressions where death/śmierć was used in the literal sense and in figurative senses, often idiomatic and not referring to the end of life of an organism (Part 1), as well as expressions where death/śmierć was masked – conveyed indirectly, by means of other concepts – mostly using metaphors and metonyms (Part 2). Death is a carrier of negative axiological charge as a source domain of metaphors (as seen in Part 1). Metaphor and metonymy are treated as language masks, i.e., pragmatic tools of pretending, used to modulate the valuing of death/śmierć (in Part 2). Valuing of seemingly equivalent or similar expressions varies cross-linguistically. Humor is a very controversial aspect in terms of its axiological parameter.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Metaphor and culture: A relationship at a crossroads?
- >‘Challenging’ times or ‘turbulent’ times: A study of the choice of metaphors used to refer to the 2008 economic crisis in Malaysia and Singapore
- “Death is the essence of all evil” – but not equally everywhere: Polish-English study on valuing and masking
- Exploring the feeling-emotions continuum across cultures: Jealousy in English and Spanish
- Metaphors of culture: Identity construction in migrants' narrative discourse
- The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture
- The translation of culturally bound metaphors in the genre of popular science articles: A corpus-based case study from Scientific American translated into Arabic
- Contributors to this issue
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Metaphor and culture: A relationship at a crossroads?
- >‘Challenging’ times or ‘turbulent’ times: A study of the choice of metaphors used to refer to the 2008 economic crisis in Malaysia and Singapore
- “Death is the essence of all evil” – but not equally everywhere: Polish-English study on valuing and masking
- Exploring the feeling-emotions continuum across cultures: Jealousy in English and Spanish
- Metaphors of culture: Identity construction in migrants' narrative discourse
- The relationship between conceptual metaphor and culture
- The translation of culturally bound metaphors in the genre of popular science articles: A corpus-based case study from Scientific American translated into Arabic
- Contributors to this issue
