Death is not only life’s “ending point,” but also an important way of its sense-making. Words and discourses of death are richly laden with cultural values, and inextricably bound with how life is practically handled.... [ view full abstract ]
Death is not only life’s “ending point,” but also an important way of its sense-making. Words and discourses of death are richly laden with cultural values, and inextricably bound with how life is practically handled. Although “death studies” as an interdisciplinary research area has been thriving, and there are death related studies in sociolinguistic subfields such as taboo words (e.g., Burridge, 2006) and genre studies (e.g., Martin, 2004), the overall limited attention that sociolinguists have paid to death and dying as a focused research area is striking. In recent years sociolinguistic research of death has emerged in China, in the following major aspects–literature reviews of death discourse research from various perspectives (e.g., Wang, 2016; using the bibliometric technique, Huang, in press); social psychological meanings of deaths among various groups (e.g., Chen, this colloquium; Chen & Gao, 2017; Gao & Zhang, this colloquium;); health communication discourses of death and dying (e.g., medical doctors’ narrative of patients’ death, Wang, 2017; suicidal crisis assessment and intervention on hotlines, Gao & Gu, 2015; Gao & Liu, 2016; Meng & Gao, 2016); media and public discourses of death (e.g., obituaries, Chang, 2016); new genres of death (e.g., living wills, Bu, in press); pedagogical discourses of death education (e.g., ethnography of death education, Meng, this colloquium). Such emerging research is situated in China’s globalizing contexts where conditions of life, cultural values, linguistic and social practices are changing, and people have become increasingly aware of their rights of life. Through explorations of how death is talked about, it is revealed how meanings of death (hence meanings of life) are constructed and reconstructed through competition, contradiction, and coexistence. In this colloquium, we will define this emerging research area, report three empirical studies, and discuss its major challenges and future prospects. An appeal is made for international research attention and collaboration on death studies from sociolinguistic perspectives. Such studies are expected to serve as participations in the meaning construction and reconstruction of people’s lives in the contemporary world.
