If Cemeteries Could Talk … A Discourse-Analytical Analysis of Epitaphs

Death discourse provides interesting material to determine how societies and cultures cope with death and the sorrow of losing a beloved one. Several aspects can be analyzed: content, language, design, and so on. This article describes a diachronic bottom-up analysis of the metaphorical language in 150 epitaphs from Belgian cemeteries. The analysis allows us to determine whether attitudes toward death and the taboo to talk directly about it have changed. Based on the existing frameworks, 13 recurring metaphors were identified and analyzed. Their occurrences are linked to the period in which they were written and the age and the gender of the deceased. Epitaphs are a stable genre on all levels of analysis. The results indicate that people are still reluctant to talk in a straightforward way about death as metaphors with positive connotations prevail.