Yousef Karami - Ilam University, Ilam, Iran
Elham Azadian - Ilam University, Ilam, Iran

The current research inspected the distribution of death conceptual metaphors in Iranian and American obituaries and their metaphoric replication in the users’ intentions, opinions, and concepts. Considering Iranian and American obituaries respectively, corpuses of 23 and 15 death metaphorical expressions in content have been chosen and analyzed. Three assessors who were the Persian Literature professors analyzed carefully the pertinent corpuses for evaluating the available death metaphorical expressions. In addition, as a research method, a focus group was engaged by the Persian Literature professors to suggest their ideas about the positive and negative connotations of the contained death conceptual metaphors in the aforementioned corpuses. The results offered that death metaphors are not distributed similarly in the chosen corpuses, are used with diverse realizations and stood for both positive and negative connotations. Also, it was met that death metaphoric expressions in both Iranian and American corpuses mostly show positive attitudes; however, some of these metaphors violate the existing rule, connoting just negative attitudes.

Cognitive linguistics; conceptual metaphor; death metaphorical expressions; peoples’ conceptions; obituaries