Conceptualization of Death in Persian Folk Language from Cognitive Sociolinguistic Perspective

Cognitive Sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics that tries to cognitively describe language varieties in society by means of teachings of its two constituent disciplines. The purpose of this article is to describe the conceptual metaphors of death in folk language within social context. The data were collected from a set of proverbs, funeral and tombstone inscriptions which were then analyzed in terms of conceptualizing death as well as the source domains used for conceptualization. The most frequent types of source domains were personification, direction, distance, existence, destruction and captivity. Among the conceptual domains mentioned, personification and destruction show a unified pessimistic view towards death, while in other source domains both positive and negative meanings were used. It shows the dual nature of death in the mind of Iranians. In personification, both the agent and the patient depart from their basic meaning and are conceptualized by different concepts. Moreover, funeral inscriptions show more optimistic and mystical views than tombstone inscriptions. The findings of this study show the dichotomies as well as the positive and negative attitudes towards death among the language users.