Der Tod als Tabu oder der Tod beim Namen genannt? Zu wörtlichen und euphemistischen Todesbenennungen in Wiener Todesanzeigen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert

Abstract

Obituaries belong to the most important text types in the public communication about death, which is the reason why the choice of language means in these texts reflects culture-specific conceptual patterns connected with dying, characteristic for the particular language and culture community. In this paper, we analyse the neutral and euphemistic vocabulary referring to the act of dying in 19th century obituaries from Vienna newspapers. The main focus of our attention lies on identifying the types of expressions for death occurring in the collected corpus as well as describing the relationship between observed statistical preferences for the use of particular neutral and euphemistic expressions and the culture-specific conceptual patterns, typical of the 19th century community of Vienna.

Keywords

• obituary
• language of death
• metaphors of death
• euphemisms