A Cognitive Study Of English And Chinese Euphemism

Euphemism is not only a widely existing cultural phenomenon, but a linguistic phenomenon, which acts as the "lubricant" in daily communication. The study of euphemism has attracted close attention of linguists, yet it is mostly restricted to rhetoric, traditional semantics, social psychology, culture and pragmatics. With the development of cognitive linguistics, some cognitive theories have been applied to explaining euphemism, but so far there have been few comparative studies of euphemism in different languages from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Based on the previous researches in this field, this thesis has made a comparative study of English and Chinese euphemism from the perspective of conceptual metaphor and metonymy within the framework of cognitive linguistics, focusing on the cognitive mechanisms of the meaning construction and understanding of English and Chinese euphemism and the underlying cognitive motivations of the similarities and differences between them.The study indicates that conceptual metaphor and metonymy are the cognitive mechanisms of English and Chinese euphemism, they both have the function of highlighting and hiding, and can provide satisfactory interpretation of the construction and understanding of English and Chinese euphemism. It is maintained that the cognitive basis of English and Chinese euphemism is the resemblance or contiguity between the source domain and target domain in the conceptual system. Specifically, the semantic concept in the source domain gets heightened when the resemblance is weak, and then it is mapped from the psychologically highly accessible source domain to the lowly accessible target domain, thus activating the target domain and making its concept salient. Analyses have been made of typical euphemisms in both English and Chinese, the result of which reveals that we can not fully account for the construction and understanding of English and Chinese euphemism only by means of conceptual metaphor or metonymy. Both of them are needed. As regards cognitive mechanisms, they are basically the same in both English and Chinese, yet differences are also noticeable: English euphemisms are mostly constructed by way of metaphor while Chinese euphemisms are mostly constructed by way of metonymy. Comparative analyses have been made of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese euphemism. The analyses which show that English and Chinese euphemism share the same cognitive motivations, which results from the universality of human cognition based on the same objective world and the same bodily experiences. Undoubtedly, there are also differences between English and Chinese euphemism, which are caused by the influence on cognition from the different cultural backgrounds and the different ways of thinking of the two peoples.This thesis is a study of the motivations of English and Chinese euphemism on the basis of cognitive theories. It is hoped that the study can not only help us to grasp the meaning construction of euphemism by way of metaphor and metonymy but also play a positive role in our understanding the cognitive motivations and the ways of thinking underlying English and Chinese euphemism. English and Chinese are both widely used languages in the world. A systematic and comprehensive comparative study of English and Chinese euphemism will be of great significance to both language communication and language teaching.