摘 要

摘要：委婉语是一种表现方法。它综合运用多种修辞手法来表达生活中那些令人不快，使人尴尬以及令人感到恐惧的事物及情形。它蕴含着丰富的文化内涵，可以折射出各种各样的社会价值观念和文化观念以及其它一些观念。作为委婉语的重要组成部分，死亡委婉语在语言学领域地位十分显著。与此同时，死亡委婉语的普遍存在以及广泛使用也间接折射出了不同文化背景下的有关死亡文化的差异。无论在汉语和英语中，人们总是非常避讳说出“死”或者与“死”相关的词句，因此在千百年来的语言发展进程中产生了大量与死亡有关的委婉语。本文试从汉英民族不同的宗教信仰、社会制度、价值观念以及社会和经济生活四个方面对汉英语言中的死亡委婉语进行比较分析，旨在通过对汉英死亡委婉语的对比分析，进一步探讨死亡的深层次文化内涵。

关键词：死亡委婉语；文化差异；文化内涵

ABSTRACT

Euphemism is a kind of rhetoric method that expresses those embarrassing, unpleasant and frightening situations in people's daily life. Euphemism is filled with rich cultural connotation. It reflects all sorts of social values and cultural perspectives and also reflects different religious beliefs, customs and social status of people. In general, death euphemism is a common phenomenon which is very complex in human society. Death euphemism is an important part of euphemism. It also plays an important role in linguistics. At the same time, the use of death euphemism also reflects cultural difference of death under different cultures. Whether in Chinese or English, most people always avoid saying “death” or phrases which are related to “death” directly. So in the development of language for thousands of years, a lot of death euphemisms emerge. This paper aims at making a comparison of death euphemisms further to explore the deep cultural connotations of death and attempting to analyze and compare the cultural differences from the aspect of religious beliefs, social hierarchy, social values and social and economic life.

Key words: Death euphemism; cultural differences; cultural implications