“生命的完结”这种自然现象在人类心理上普遍带有一种不祥的色彩,因此各民族的语言中都有许多关于“死”的讳饰。尽管因民族心理和风俗习惯的不同在讳饰的方式上有很大差别,但是所有的讳饰从本质上来说都是把“死”这一无可辩驳的事实用模糊、委婉的语言表达出来,因而对“死”的讳饰归根到底是一个模糊度的问题。汉语中有关“死”的说法从古至今恐怕不下几百个,据作者粗略统计,《红楼梦》一书中关于“死”的讳饰约有许个。这些讳饰比拟方式各异,模糊程度不一,反映了复杂的文化、心理现象。本文试图从语言环境入手对“死”的讳饰的模糊度进行粗浅的探讨,以管窥语言环境与语义模糊度之间的关系及其所包含的深层文化现象。从社会文化环境来看,《红楼梦》的作者生活于明末清初的封建时代,因而作品中出现了一些带有浓厚封建色彩的讳饰,如“薨”、“归地府”、“宾天”、“升仙”等。这些用来讳饰“死”的事物都是中国封建文化中特有的现象,反映了语义的历史 The natural phenomenon “End of Life” is generally ominous in human psychology. Therefore, there are many taboos on “death” in the languages ​​of all ethnic groups. Although there are great differences in the ways of taboos because of differences in national psychology and customs, all taboo is essentially the irrefutable truth of “death” expressed in vague and euphemistic language Therefore, the taboo on “death” is ultimately a matter of ambiguity. Chinese saying “dead” is probably no less than a few hundred in ancient times. According to the rough statistics of the author, there are about a dozen of the taboo words about “death” in the book A Dream of Red Mansions. These taboos contrast in different ways, the degree of ambiguity, reflecting the complex cultural and psychological phenomena. This article attempts to start from the linguistic environment to discuss the ambiguity of the “dead” taboo in order to glimpse the relationship between the semantic ambiguity and the language environment and the deep cultural phenomena it contains. From the perspective of social and cultural environment, the author of “Dream of Red Mansions” lived in the feudal era from the late Ming Dynasty to the early Qing Dynasty. Therefore, there appeared some taboos with rich feudal colors in the works such as “薨”, “Gui Fu Prefecture”, “ ”,“ Rose cents ”and so on. All these things used to confuse “death” are peculiar phenomena in Chinese feudal culture and reflect the semantic history