Death Idioms in the English and German language: A Contrastive Analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject German Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Erfurt, course: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This paper consists of two major parts, a theoretical framework and a contrastive analysis of idioms of death in the English and German language. The first part deals with the linguistic definition of the term "idiom", including possibilities for their classification. The second section of the first part is going to present the concept of euphemism followed by a brief explanation and categorization of metaphors and the attempt of giving possible reasons for the maintaining taboo of death in western culture. The purpose of the second part of this paper is to analyze and compare a number of English and German idioms of death contrastively, in order to identify lexical and semantic similarities, including the investigation of the origin of certain expressions. Subsequently, a short closing reflection will end up this paper.

As death plays a significant role not only in western society but in communities all around the globe, idioms related to death became an important tool in human communication. But what is the actual purpose of using paraphrases in order to relate to death in an utterance? Why do idioms of death have a cultural importance and how is an idiom actually defined? Do certain idioms of death have the same semantic meaning in other languages?

Human communication has created a great number of idioms and figures of speech which range throughout every section of the daily life and appear in every situation possible. As this phenomenon indeed shows its importance, linguists have created the field of phraseology to investigate such expressions. Based on language contact and historical events, many idioms have synonyms and equivalent counterparts in several languages. Learning the specific idioms related to a certain culture helps to get to know more about the history, ethics and social values of a certain community.