Kick the Bucket or Cash in One's Chips : An analysis of some English slang expressions for dying

This research analyses some of the slang expressions with the meaning ‘to die’ found in Dictionary of Modern Slang with regard to metaphor and metonymy and whether they have been active when creating the identified slang expressions. It further examines the frequency of these expressions in a large language corpus, and identifies the processes involved in the most frequent expressions. The main findings show that the domain ‘departure’ is the most frequent domain for metaphorical conceptualizations of dying, which suggests that death, like life, can be viewed as a journey. One can speculate that this metaphorical mapping could go back to religious origin, where death is not seen as the end. Several of the expressions are still used within the English language, and the most frequent expressions in the corpus were metonymic in nature and have developed into idiomatic phrases, which are frozen in form