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Article published In: Cognitive Linguistic Studies
Vol. 6:1 (2019) ► pp.84–102

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Death in a multicultural society

Metaphor, language and religion in Singapore obituaries

 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Published online: 12 July 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00031.tay
Abstract
Obituaries are a tractable source of metaphorical depictions of death, which in turn offer unique insights into the near-universality versus culture and context-specificity of metaphors. In multicultural settings, they can shed further light on the underexplored question of how metaphor use interacts with linguistic and religious identities. This paper is a case study of newspaper obituaries (N = 337) in the multicultural and multilingual context of Singapore. It uses a mixed-methods approach to uncover the types of death-related metaphors across languages and religions, their near-universal and culture-specific aspects, and significant associations between religion and metaphor use/non-use (χ² (2, N = 337) = 84.54, p < 0.001, Cramer’s V = 0.501, Log (BF10) = 47.14), language and metaphor use/non-use (χ² (1, N = 337) = 71.2, p < 0.001, Cramer’s V = 0.46, Log (BF10) = 42.25), and religion and language of the deceased (χ² (2, N = 337) = 48.11, p < 0.001, Cramer’s V = 0.378, Log (BF10) = 19.7). The findings extend prevailing discussion from the substantive contents of metaphors to the intra-societal pragmatics of their use, connecting metaphor explicitly with the construction of religious and linguistic identities.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
    • 2.1Corpus of obituaries
    • 2.2Metaphor identification
    • 2.3Coding
    • 2.4Analysis
  • 3.Findings and discussion
    • 3.1Common image-schematic grounding of death-related metaphors
    • 3.2Variability in death-related metaphors
    • 3.3Relationships between metaphor use, religious identity, and language choice
    • 3.4The relationship between religion and metaphor use
    • 3.5The relationship between language and metaphor use
    • 3.6The relationship between religion and language of obituaries
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
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