The Application Of Euphemism In Intercultural Communication

Euphemism is a common phenomenon in all languages. It touches all aspects of social lives and plays a very important part in people's communications. Plenty of transcendent achievements have been made since some scholars conducted their studies in this field. We may find, however, it is far from satisfactory because the euphemism remains a barrier to people's daily communication, especially to intercultural communication. Therefore, this paper aims at helping intercultural communicators get rid of the confusion as to understanding and using euphemism through the introduction to its linguistic features, analysis of its pragmatic functions and its main applications in social lives.In order to have a better understanding of euphemism, this paper at first introduces some definitions of euphemism given by famous scholars and provides a detailed analysis of them. Besides, some other linguistic features of euphemism are also introduced, including its development history, classification and its formation. We know, as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon, euphemism has strong communicative functions that explain its wide existence. When talking about the unpleasing or embarrassing matters, people tend to use euphemistic, mild or less direct words in place of those words that are clear in fact but sound direct or offensive. To sum up, Euphemism has four communicative functions as follows: evasive function, politeness function, cosmetic function, humorous and satirical function.Due to the strong communicative functions, the use of euphemisms has...