Abstract
The present paper compares the statistical data concerning the use of conceptual
metaphors for death and dying in the Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA) and Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego (NKJP). Since death belongs to
taboo topics, people often resort to euphemisms in order to cope with this diffi cult
issue. Among linguistic devices used to create death euphemisms a special role is
played by metaphor. Linguists interested in the language of death and dying provide
lists of metaphors used by English and Polish speakers to conceptualize death, compiled
on the basis of dictionaries, literature, press obituaries, headstone inscriptions,
and even a TV series. In line with Kövecses’s observations (2005) that patterns of
metaphorical conceptualization are not completely universal among cultures and
languages, it is assumed that the metaphors for death and dying also differ between
American Polish and English. The analysis of lexical correlates of death metaphors
in the two language corpora allows us to identify the most common and the least
common metaphors in both languages.
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