This article explores the way in which death metaphors written in the urban mural for David Bowie in London contribute to creatively reframing the artist’s death. While research on death metaphors has focussed on traditional written genres such as obituaries and epitaphs, studies of urban memorials and shrines have focussed on the creation of fandom identities, downplaying the role played by figurativity, creativity and emotional connotation. The present article aims to bridge the gap between these two areas of study by presenting a corpus-based study of 585 items written on the mural for David Bowie. The research questions are: (1) How is Bowie’s death (metaphorically) conceptualised? (2) To what extent are death metaphors in Bowie’s mural creative? and (3) What is the relationship between the metaphorical framing of Bowie’s death and the projection of emotional connotations? The findings of our study reveal that Bowie’s songs emerge as a highly productive metaphorical source domain to understand the artist’s death, in which fans recontextualise lines from Bowie’s lyrics in creative and positive ways.

本文探讨了在伦敦大卫鲍伊的城市壁画中写下的死亡隐喻如何有助于创造性地重新定义艺术家的死亡。虽然对死亡隐喻的研究集中在讣告和墓志铭等传统书面体裁上，但对城市纪念馆和神社的研究则集中在创造粉丝身份，淡化比喻性、创造力和情感内涵所起的作用。本文旨在通过对 David Bowie 壁画上的 585 个项目进行基于语料库的研究，弥合这两个研究领域之间的差距。研究问题是：(1) 鲍伊的死（隐喻）是如何概念化的？（2）鲍伊的壁画创作中的死亡隐喻在多大程度上是有创意的？（3）鲍伊之死的隐喻框架与情感内涵的投射有什么关系？我们的研究结果表明，鲍伊的歌曲成为理解艺术家死亡的高效隐喻源域，歌迷以创造性和积极的方式重新构建鲍伊歌词中的台词。