| Guarded Understatement (GU) is a very interesting phenomenon in diplomatic language use. The term "Guarded Understatement" was first proposed by H. Nicholson in his "Diplomacy" (1950) . He defines Guarded Understatements as "phrases that enable diplomats to say sharp things to each other -without becoming provocative or impolite." (1950:230)Penghong and Peng xiaodong, in their "diplomatic English"(1999), extend the concept of Guarded Understatement, making it "the most important sense of the term 'diplomatic language'."With the purpose of setting a more in-depth and more comprehensive model of GU study, this study probes into it mainly from 4 aspects i.e.(l) Motivations of GU, (2) Specific Forms of GU, (3) Meaning (both verbal and intended) conveyed by GU, and (4) the correlation between GU and illocutionary acts.This thesis attempts to apply knowledge of pragmatics to the GU study and aims to analyze it from a pragmatic perspective.(l)This paper tries to explain the Motivations of GU with perspective of pragmatic conceptualization of politeness i.e. the principle of politeness proposed by Leech and face strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson.(2) With the aid of Gricean theory and speech act theory, this thesis lists up some specific forms frequently taken by GU in diplomatic discourses.(3) By consulting the theory of implicature and taking the knowledge of context intoconsideration, the author analyzes ways to determine the meanings conveyed by GU. (4) The correlation between GU and illocutionary acts is also discussed in this paper. This study theoretically tries to broaden the discussion of GU by analyzing it from pragmatic perspectives and to better understand the "art" of mitigating shocks brought by sharp topics. Practically, this study emphasizes the significance of using such mitigating devices. In addition to that, this thesis attempts to propose some speech strategies, which enable speakers to talk about sharp issues in a less unpleasant manner.
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