Accommodating Language: A Comparative Investigation of the Use of Euphemisms for Death and Dying in Obituaries in English and in German

Abstract

Death notices as typically found in newspapers depict a conventionalized use of language which reflects the cultural norms attached to announcing someone’s death and saying good-bye. Frequently, the event of death or dying is not explicitly referred to in obituaries, but rather circumscribed by the use of euphemistic expressions. Drawing on previous studies on the use of euphemisms in relation to the event of death (e.g., Crespo Fernandez, SKY J Linguistic 19:101–130, 2006; Haddad, Damascus Univ J 25:41–59, 2009; Rabab’ah and Al-Qarni, J Pragmatic 44:730−743, 2012) we propose an understanding of euphemism as “pragmeme”, representing “instantiated” (Capone, La Linguistique 46:3–21, 2010; Capone and Mey, Introduction: pragmatics, linguistics, and sociocultural diversity. In: Capone A, Mey JL (eds) Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society. Springer, New York, pp 1–11, 2016; Mey, Developing pragmatics interculturally. In: Kecskes I, Horn LR (eds) Explorations in pragmatics: linguistic, cognitive and intercultural aspects. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 165–189, 2007; J Pragmatic 42:2882–2888, 2010) communicative strategies which can be characterized as genre-, language-, and culture-specific. By drawing on 80 death notices in the English language from The New York Times and 80 obituaries from the Neue Zurcher Zeitung in the German language, respectively, the study presents a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of different instantiations of euphemisms (e.g., ‘metaphor of departure’, ‘metaphor of sleep’, or ‘orthophemism’). The encountered euphemisms have distinguished characteristics, thus providing evidence of the different extent to which socio-cultural norms are encoded through euphemistic references.