Publications

Publication details [#66562]

Tay, Dennis. 2019. Death in a multicultural society. Metaphor, language and religion in Singapore obituaries. Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) 54 (1).
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/csl

Annotation

Obituaries are a tractable source of metaphorical depictions of death, which in turn offer unique insights into the near-universality versus culture and context-specificity of metaphors. In multicultural settings, they can shed further light on the underexplored question of how metaphor use interacts with linguistic and religious identities. This paper is a case study of newspaper obituaries (N?=?337) in the multicultural and multilingual context of Singapore. It uses a mixed-methods approach to uncover the types of death-related metaphors across languages and religions, their near-universal and culture-specific aspects, and significant associations between religion and metaphor use/non-use (?² (2, N?=?337)?=?84.54, p?