Softboiled Speech: A Contrastive Analysis of Death Euphemisms in Egyptian Arabic and Chinese

Abstract

This contrastive study is geared towards investigating the euphemistic language of death in Egyptian Arabic and Chinese The results indicate that euphemisms are universal since they exist in every language and no human communication is without euphemisms Both Egyptian and Chinese native speakers regard the topic of death as a taboo Therefore they handle it with care Egyptian Arabic and Chinese employ euphemistic expressions to avoid mentioning the topic of death However Chinese has a large number of death euphemisms as compared with the Egyptian Arabic ones The results also show that death euphemisms are structurally and basically employed in both Egyptian Arabic and Chinese in metonymy as a linguistic device and a figure of speech Moreover they employ conceptual metaphor to substitute the taboo topic of death