Conceptualization of "Suspended Death" in Children's Stories: Based on Cognitive Pragmatic Schemas

Cognitive pragmatic schemas are one of the topics in cognitive linguistics, and applying this approach to the study of death in children's literature serves as a bridge between the fields of literature, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy for children. A single word can have different meanings under various cognitive pragmatic schemas. Cognitive pragmatic schemas are dependent on situational and functional contexts. This research aims to categorize the representations of suspended death based on cognitive pragmatic schemas. In children's literature, death is often portrayed as a reversible phenomenon; therefore, this motif has been chosen as the research subject. The statistical sample of the current research is the stories for age groups "A," "B," and "C," works that featured the assumption of its reversibility in their content. Each of these stories is like an practs to call and form the scheme of death. The current research aims to answer how situational speech acts in children's stories modify the frightening representation of death in forming and invocating the schema of suspended death. This article introduces five situational speech acts for the schema of suspended death: resurrection with external stimulus, resurrection with internal stimulus, transformation with external catalyst, transformation with internal catalyst, and delusion. Since concepts like "death" are abstract, philosophical, and emotionally provocative in nature, the way these concepts are conveyed to children has always been a subject of debate. This research, employs a descriptive-analytical method, demonstrates that children's stories modify the frightening representation of "death" by using various cognitive schemas of reversible death.