Sociolinguistic Study On Euphemism

Euphemism is a proper language style that people pursue in social communication in order to reach an ideal communication effect. Euphemism can avoid and soften taboos and sensitive or awkward topics. In every stage and each nation, euphemisms are widely adopted. Thus, the creation and usage of euphemism is a common phenomenon in human language. Researches about euphemism are abundant. Linguistics, home and abroad, have done a lot of researches about the creation, substitute and development of euphemism from perspective of rhetoric, social convention, pragmatics and psychology.Because euphemism is used in certain community and is influenced by social-culture factors, thus, it is heavily marked with social-culture features."Euphemism can reflect the general and special features of society, social values, morality and the nationality and universal feature of culture"(Peng Wenzhao, 1993).As a special language phenomenon, euphemism not only includes those euphemistic expressions accepted by community members, but also includes the euphemistic communication style that people adopt in specific environment. The use of euphemism varies with the gender, age, social status and occupation, etc., of the social members and euphemism covers various aspects of social culture, including social conventions, traditional morality, religion, social values and politics, etc., which shows that euphemism is deeply rooted in social culture. It is impossible to have a profound understanding of language without referring to social culture. That is why this dissertation aims to analyze the definition, classifications, basic functions and diachronic features of euphemism from the perspective of sociolinguistics. The...