The occurrences of kill and killer are often understood as negative; however, evidence suggests that these words also have positive meanings. To many people, the use of kill and killer indicates physical death, but we found other meanings of these words. First, death is the worst possible outcome, but it is not necessarily a consequence of kill and killer. Second, killer, in particular, has a strong positive meaning that is extended from the ‘deadly’ meaning of kill. Third, we found that the figurative use of killer appeared more often in magazines and newspapers, as well as in fiction but with different purposes, when we compared the data from magazines and newspapers with those from different genres. The results obtained by analysing magazine and newspaper corpora in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) showed the importance of pragmatic interpretation in understanding meanings.

杀人和杀手的发生通常被认为是负面的；但是，有证据表明这些词也具有积极意义。对许多人来说，使用杀伤和杀手表明肉体的死亡，但我们发现的这些话其他含义。首先，死亡是最糟糕的结果，但不一定是杀戮和杀手的后果。其次，杀手，特别是有从“致命”的含义扩展强大的积极意义杀。第三，我们发现比喻性使用杀手当我们比较杂志和报纸的数据与不同流派的数据时，在杂志和报纸以及小说中出现的频率更高，但目的却有所不同。通过分析《当代美国英语语料库》（COCA）中的杂志和报纸语料库所获得的结果表明，务实解释在理解意义中的重要性。