CONCEPTUALIZATION OF “ DEATH IS THE END OF A DAY” IN ENGLISH AND CHINESE LITERARY TEXTS

Abstract

Some events are too distasteful to be approached without linguistic maneuvering. One of these is undoubtedly death, a timeless taboo in which psychological, religious, and social interdiction coexist. The study investigates and compares two conceptual metaphors “death is night/ darkness” and “death is sleep/rest” in English and Chinese literary texts, these two subordinate metaphors are included in the metaphor “death is the end of a day”, using the framework of the well-known conceptual metaphortheory initiated by Lakoff and Johnson(1980, 2003).It has been found that, based on 11 examples that are extracted from English and Chinese literary texts that both languages use strikingly similar conceptual metaphors of expressing death to mitigate theeffect of death. Evidence based on data analysis supports the view about the universality of conceptual metaphors(2005).