Death euphemism is a pervasive language phenomenon,which is typical in the euphemism. This artical attempts to adopt Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending theory to illustrate the meaning construction and the cognitive interpretation of English death euphemism,and tries to explore its cognitive mechanism in order to provide a new theoretical perspective for its development.
On the production and understanding of the idioms, cognitive linguists put forward totally different opinions from the traditional linguistic theory. One enduring belief about the arbitrariness of English idioms is that they are non-componential, because their idiomatic meanings are not deducible from the meaning of their individual parts. According to"conceptual metaphor"theory, which are proposed by cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson: Metaphor is a mapping that from one more familiar, more easily understanding source domain to a less familiar, more difficult target domain. The paper studies on the idiomaticity and the motivation of the idioms based on the"conceptual metaphor"theory from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.
