Interpreting Euphemism In Cross-Cultural Communication

Euphemism is a common phenomenon of all languages. It has been studied by many scholars from the perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. So far, achievements on euphemism study have been conspicuous. Yet, people of different cultural backgrounds still often feel confused, when each other's euphemism is mentioned in communication. In order to interpret euphemism successfully in cross-cultural communication, this paper is on a basis of contrastive analysis.Firstly, it analyses the linguistic features of euphemism: its definition, classification, formation, its generation and semantic change as well as the laws in its making, which gives us a better understanding of euphemism. In terms of definition, the article mentions not only the conventional definition of euphemism but also discusses its grammatical features (negation, tense, voice, etc.) and its use in discourse. As to the means of formation, in both English and Chinese the following devices are used: phonetic device, lexical device and grammatical device, etc., though the two languages are different in certain specific aspects because they belong to different language systems. The generation of euphemism can be explained from the semiotic perspective and the phenomenon of synonymous euphemisms can be described by the Grasham's Law of Semantic Change. There are three general principles to which all euphemisms must conform. They are: the distance principle, the relation principle and the pleasantness principle.Euphemism is a universal phenomenon in all cultures. Although there exist some similarities, however, owing to different beliefs, customs, life-styles, and behaviors of English and Chinese people, each language's euphemism has their own peculiarities. Probing into them and having a comparison will be a good way for mastering it and help a lot in successful cross-cultural communication. As euphemism originated in languagetaboo, we can't talk about one without referring to the other. Different peoples differ politically, economically, and culturally, but they share something in common in psychology, thus euphemism is always used to evade, to upgrade, and to disguise. The significant cultural differences between English and Chinese in terms of euphemism are shown in that English euphemism has obvious religious characteristic while Chinese euphemism shows the character of class. Society is in a constant state of development and change, so is language. As a common language phenomenon, euphemism is also changing constantly. Many euphemisms bear the imprint of times.The Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle are two basic guiding principles in communication. To some degree, to meet a certain need, people often flout some maxims of the CP. The use of euphemism is just the case. Besides, in social interaction, we should understand the interaction between euphemism and such social variables as age, sex, social classes and occupation, for these social variables affect the way people speak and behave.In brief, only through getting acquainted with the features of euphemism, raising awareness of cultural differences and interpreting it according to social context can we carry out successful cross-cultural communication.