Cultural conceptualisations relating to DEATH in Irish English from a diachronic perspective
The present thesis looks at cultural conceptualisations in relation to DEATH in Irish English from a Cultural Linguistic perspective and puts a special focus on the diachronic development of these conceptualisations. For the study, a corpus consisting of 1,400 death notices from the Dublin-based national newspaper The Irish Times from 14 historical periods between 1859 and 2023 was compiled, resulting in a highly specialised 70,000-word corpus. First, the manual qualitative analysis of the death notices produced evidence for eight superordinate cultural conceptualisations surrounding DEATH, namely, in the order of their frequency THE DEAD ARE TO BE REMEMBERED OR REGRETTED, DEATH IS SOMETHING POSITIVE, DEATH IS REST, DEATH IS A JOURNEY, DYING IS THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER LIFE, DEATH IS (NOT) A TABOO, DEATH IS GOD’S WILL, and DEATH IS THE END. These conceptualisations were derived from linguistic expressions in the death notices that have these conceptualisations as a cognitive basis. Second, the quantitative comparison of the individual conceptualisations detected diachronic variation, which is interconnected with historical and social developments in Ireland. The thesis, therefore, illustrates the applicability of Cultural Linguistics as an adequate method for diachronic studies interested in culturally determined developments of conceptualisations.
cultural linguistics, Irish English, death, diachronic, cultural conceptualisations, Irisches Englisch, Tod, diachronisch, kulturelle Konzeptualisierungen
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