The concept of death in British worldview: verbal and textual manifestations

Abstract

This article focuses on investigating DEATH as a concept in its verbal and textual manifestations to provide insights into its lexicographic and textual portrayals. The notion of death, being one of the fundamental aspects of human existence, belongs to the category of universal concepts that are of paramount importance in the linguistic domain of every society. The present study employs lexicographic sources and the British literature discourse of the 20th and 21st centuries to analyse the definitions of the respective lexeme and its contextual usage. The results show that the core of DEATH is represented by the following semantic features: “end of all functions of life “, “a murder or killing,” “termination,” “destruction,”, “experience considered as terrible as death,” “a personification of death,” “a cause of death,” “loss or absence of spiritual life,” “massacre,” “a state of being dead”. The article explores how linguistic devices related to the concept of death are structured and employed in the British discourse. The concept of death is verbalized through a range of linguistic elements, including different parts of speech such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, as well as expressions and euphemisms.