Introducing Cherophobia Cultuling A Close Look into the Discursive Functions of Death-oriented Terms in Persian Language

Considering the salient role of vocabularies in reflecting the cultural beliefs of a given society, the present study aims at examining the discursive functions of “death” and the related terms in the Persian language corpus, using Hymes's (1967) SPEAKING model. The reason we have chosen such concept is that not only can it vividly illustrate the existing cultural beliefs of a society, but also it can be examined from social and linguistic points of view. To this end, 673 contexts in which the death-related discourses have been used were recorded, and after analyzing the data based on the SPEAKING model, the social aspects of the discursive functions were extracted. The results revealed that the intention behind using death and its related terms among Persian speakers of Iran is rooted in the prevalence of morbid thoughts, death-seeking, necrolatry, love of sadness, and cherophobia.