The Linguistic tools for Conceptualization of “Death” in ‎Persian Language: A Cognitive-Cultural Approach

Death is a vague, frightening and abstract concept, mostly considered as a taboo. The current study investigates the ways of conceptualizing death among Persian language speakers in a representative corpus of Persian texts. It seeks answer to the question: What kind of linguistic tools are used by Persian language speakers in order to conceptualize the phenomenon of death and what cultural elements are involved in this regard .To answer the research question, we used the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and a selection of obituaries and epitaphs as data and attempted to identify and extract all the expressions which were directly or indirectly related to the concept of death. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), by Lakoff and Johnson (1987), and cultural conceptualization by Sharifian (2011), the ways death is conceptualized were identified on the basis of a cognitive-cultural approach.