Cultural Conceptualisations of DEATH in Taiwanese Buddhist and Christian Eulogistic Idioms
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This chapter explores cultural conceptualisations reflected in the language of death by analyzing Chinese eulogistic expressions delivered at funerals. Death is the central issue that all cultures have to deal with, with metaphor being an essential part in helping people conceptualize it. In this connection, eulogies delivered at funerals, as language used by the living to talk about the deceased, provides an empirical basis for investigating cultural conceptualizations of death by examining how they actually verbalize death in a real socio-cultural setting. The data come from funerals in Taiwan, which constitute a distinctive cultural event category. Delivering eulogistic expressions is an integral part of any funeral in Taiwan, where written eulogistic expressions are displayed on white cloth banners throughout the ceremony. The expressions are highly conventionalized, as they always appear in the form of four-character idioms, which indicates how deeply rooted they are in the local cultural schemas. The practice is so frequent and culturally significant that the Taipei City Government set up an official online system for requesting eulogistic expressions on electronic banners at public funerals. A cultural metaphor analysis will be done on the expressions in the system. The design of the eulogy-requesting system further provides a convenient platform through which the interaction between culture, religion and metaphor can be observed. When one requests a eulogy, the system asks the religious belief of the deceased, and accordingly shows the appropriate expressions for selection. There are three main categories in the system: Buddhist, Christian, and General (which I take as non-believers), which more or less reflects the religious composition of the contemporary Taiwanese culture. This chapter discusses the metaphor differences among the three sub-cultures. A preliminary observation is that a lot of Buddhist metaphors involve culture-specific source domains such as PLANTS (specifically FLOWER and LOTUS) and MOTION, which are absent in Christian metaphors. In contrast, Christian metaphors predominantly involve the source domain of SLEEP. Metaphors for non-believers involve a wide variety of cultural symbols, including ANIMALS such as CRANE and WHALE, which have their roots in local folk beliefs. I argue that the differences in metaphor use can be attributed to the different cultural schemas that define the religious worldviews. In particular, for people with different religious background (as different sub-cultures), death is understood against different cultural schemas and their associated conceptual patterns, which as a result produces different linguistic metaphors. The collection of eulogistic expressions that I use in the study constitutes an empirical case of how cultural schemas and metaphors interact in how people conventionally verbalize and conceptualize death in the sub-cultures in one society. It is hoped that the proposed study can help show how Cultural Linguistics can shed light on the ways in which culture and religion co-contribute to variation of metaphor use in conceptualizing death in a multi-religious society, with Taiwan as a case in point. |