Metaphor as a Means of Communicating Emotional Experience (Death) in Religious Discourse

Abstract

Loss, untimely departure, and a sense of emptiness are common experiences in coping with sudden death. In such situations, metaphors prove to be a key means of expression, especially when personal experience is not aligned with collective discourse, and emotional experiences often lead to creative metaphorical production (Littlemore 2019; Moon, 1998). In religious language, metaphor occupies a special place as a means of figurative representation and can be analyzed through the identification of conceptual mappings and their linguistic realizations (Hobbs 2021). This paper empirically analyses conceptual metaphors in religiously marked narratives of mourning based on a corpus of 68 posts taken from a memorial page on the social media platform Facebook. The analysis examines which metaphors occur, how they are distributed within the corpus, and which discursive and religious functions they perform. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, the analysis shows that participants structure the experience of death as embodied experience, the perception of time, attitudes towards the self, and religious discourse, and how this contributes to the function of religion in linguistic communication. The paper contributes to research in cognitive linguistics and religious discourse by showing how universal patterns of metaphorical conceptualization intertwine with contextually specific religious meanings within the discourse of mourning.