He passed away watching people die on TV : A corpus study about euphemisms for to die, dying or dead in American English

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the use and frequency of euphemisms for die, dying or dead in the American English-language using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. To fulfill the purpose, three research questions were answered. I wanted to know in which genres, of Spoken, Fiction, Magazines, Newspapers, Academic texts, TV/Movies, Blogs and web-gnl, the euphemisms occurred the most. I also wanted to investigate which euphemism, in terms of frequency, of pass away, demise, decease and last breath was the most common one, and how frequent they are compared to the “standard” die, dying or dead. How the frequency of the euphemisms developed over the time span 1990-2019, was also something the study wanted to answer. To answer these questions, studies which defined and discussed taboo, euphemisms, and metonymy were used. The conclusion was that even the least occurring genre in the standard has got a higher frequency than all the euphemisms together. However, demise was the most frequent euphemism and Fiction, TV/Movies and Academic were the genres in which the euphemisms occur the most in. Moreover, although demise was the most frequent euphemism, it was also the one that decreased the most over the period of 30 years. pass away, however, increased the most over time.