Linguistic means of neutralising death in the letters written by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and addressed to late Jerzy Błeszyński Cover Image

Językowe środki neutralizacji śmierci w listach Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza do zmarłego Jerzego Błeszyńskiego
Linguistic means of neutralising death in the letters written by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and addressed to late Jerzy Błeszyński

Author(s): Andrzej S. Dyszak
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Theoretical Linguistics, Semantics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
Keywords: conceptualisation of death; neutralisation; euphemisation

Summary/Abstract: The article contains an analysis of the letters written by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and addressed to his late lover Jerzy Błeszyński, and depicts the manner of ‘talking’ of the author of the letters about the addressee’s death so that it can be neutralised, i.e. its impact on the life of the writer will be weakened and/or the opposition between death (a fact that took place) and life (in the imagined world of the letters) will be abolished. The article may be placed in the sphere of research based on the method of stylistic grammar, and it deals with the questions that concern semantic phenomena and the manner of their formal-language creation. Iwaszkiewicz used the motif of the trip that never happened of Błeszyński to Surubai, Indonesia, to replace with it mentions of his lover’s death in the whole collection of the ‘posthumous letters’. In addition to coding it – the death – with words and expressions taken from the lexical field of travelling in the analysed text there are linguistic exponents of conceptualisation of death as an absence and separation of the dead person. In two letters Iwaszkiewicz refers to the death of Błeszyński as a dream. In order to avoid talking directly about death the author of the ‘posthumous letters’ uses a few euphemisms. However, in Iwaszkiewicz’s letters there appear various linguistic tracks of a death of a person he was close to. He is aware of the fact that Błeszyński left for good, and at the same time he cannot believe it.

  • Issue Year: 2019
  • Issue No: 18
  • Page Range: 55-74
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Polish