A Cross-Cultural Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Diplomatic Euphemisms

As a common linguistic phenomenon,euphemism plays an indispensable part in our daily life,which helps to achieve successful social communication and coordinates human rapport.It has attracted attention of linguists and scholars for a long time.Many of them have studied euphemism from different perspectives with fruitful contributions and achievements.However,in the existing literature,it is found that there are few studies on diplomatic euphemism used in diplomatic discourse,particularly speeches in press conference.This thesis,by drawing upon the previous studies and insights,analyzes the diplomatic euphemism used in the transcripts of 22 English and Chinese press conferences selected from U.S.Department of State(https://www.state.gov/)and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China(http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/web/).A contrastive and detailed analysis of the diplomatic euphemism applied in these press conferences has been made from the perspectives of linguistic constitution and pragmatic function.By doing so,the study attempts to find out the communicative functions and explore the patterns of the employment of euphemism in violating Cooperative Principle and observing the Politeness Principle in this special genre.The major research findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)although English and Chinese diplomatic euphemisms have something in common in terms of linguistic constitution,they still bear differences due to different cultural background.(2)diplomatic euphemism violates the Cooperative Principle,in the meantime,it obeys the Polite Principle,which aims to disguise the truth,defend themselves and show politeness.The present thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of diplomatic euphemisms in English and Chinese by contrastively analyzing them in terms of construction and communication function,which will contribute to not only a better understanding of linguistic characteristics of diplomatic euphemisms,but also a proper interpretation and application of euphemism in communication.