The notion of death as reflected in language: euphemisms for ‘die’ in Old and Middle English

The present study examines Old and Middle English euphemisms rendering the sense ‘die’, analysing their character and incidence in medieval texts and thus attempting at characterising the status which euphemisms had in the lexicon. Hence, the textual distribution of euphemisms for ‘die’ is scrutinised in particular literary genres and a lexico-semantic analysis of the forms is provided. The material comes chiefly from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose and the Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose. The monograph consists of four chapters, the first of which contains the presentation of the methodology employed as well as a short discussion of the theoretical issues serving as the point of reference in the study. Chapter Two, providing the background for the subsequent discussion, concisely presents Old English euphemisms for ‘die’. Chapter Three and Four investigate the nature and incidence of Middle English euphemistic verbs and verbal expressions in prose and poetry, respectively. The material is analysed separately for particular literary genres and an attempt is made to identify the factors which could have had impact on the emergence of euphemisms. Concluding remarks follow Chapter Four.