A Pragmatic Analysis Of English Euphemism

Euphemism is a common linguistic as well as cultural phenomenon in daily life. Itoils the human relationship in communication and helps to save face of communicators.English euphemism holds great interest for scholars both eastern and western and someexciting progress has been made both at home and abroad in its studies from variouspoints of view. Yet it would be undeniable that there are drawbacks at the same time. Firstly, they all neglect the important fact that an adequate account of euphemismcannot be independent of context. Secondly, the previous attempts and achievementsmade on English euphemism are mostly restricted to the lexical level. In order to bridge these gaps the author constructs a new framework within which ananalysis of English euphemism is conducted from a pragmatic perspective. The authorsuggests analyzing English euphemism by means of the pragmatic theories: the contexttheory, the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle. This thesis is composed of six parts with Chapters Three and Four as the core: Introduction reviews the studies made on English euphemism, clarifies two majordefects in them and then advances a new way to analyze this subject, an analysis fromthe angle of pragmatics. The first chapter forms the basis of the whole research by providing some new andfundamental knowledge on English euphemism. In the first place, the author deducesthat it is necessary to redefine euphemism in terms of context. By no means is anexpression a euphemism intrinsically but it is a euphemism in a certain context. Then,the author extends English euphemism from the lexical level to the higher ones: thesentence level, discourse level and even non-linguistic level. In accordance with the newdefinition the formation and classification of English euphemism are dealt with. The second chapter discusses the relationship between euphemism, language andculture. English euphemism is not only a part of the English language but also a markerof English culture, which indicates that its analysis cannot be separated from itscommunicative or sociocultural context. The third chapter focuses on the way in which context influences the application ofEnglish euphemism. The author construes context as both linguistic and extra-linguisticknowledge, with the latter as the main concern in this thesis. It turns out that suchsituation factors as the gender of participants, their relative social status, their attitudesand purposes, the setting, the channel as well as the subject matter are the importantagents in deciding whether euphemisms should be used or not and which one should beused. Besides, English euphemisms vary from one historical period to another. The fourth chapter centers on the comprehension of English euphemism, a deviationfrom the normal English language, and it is found that they flout the maxims of theCooperative Principle in order to observe the Politeness Principle. It is satisfying to have reached perfect agreement between the results derived fromthe study of English euphemism in Chapters Two, Three and Four and the newdefinition of euphemism proposed in Chapter One. The last chapter concludes the whole thesis and deals with how the findings of thisthesis can be applied to cross-cultural communication. Appropriate use of Englisheuphemism can contribute a lot to successful message exchange.