A Pragmatic Study Of Euphemism In Forrest Gump

Euphemism is a common linguistic as well as cultural phenomenon in daily life. It oils the human relationship in communication and helps to save face of communicators. English euphemism holds great interest for scholars both eastern and western and some exciting progress has been made both home and abroad in its studies from various points of view. Yet it would be undeniable that there are drawbacks at the same time. Firstly, they all neglect the important fact that an adequate account of euphemism cannot be independent of context. Secondly, the previous attempts and achievements made on English euphemism are mostly restricted to the lexical level.The profound moral and social culture of Forrest Gump provide good context for studying euphemisms. In order to bridge these gaps the author proposes a new study way: analyze euphemism in Forrest Gump from a pragmatic perspective. The author thinks none of words or phrases is euphemistic inherently or in other words, they make sense as euphemistic expressions solely in a certain specific context. In addition, euphemism is not only limited to the lexical level, some sentences and discourses can be construed as euphemisms under certain circumstances. This paper selects representative euphemism fragments from Forrest Gump as communicative context and cultural context. After analysis, the author discovered that it is hard to explain language phenomenon comprehensively without communicative context and social culture. The author suggests analyzing English euphemism by means of the pragmatic theories: the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle. The application of English euphemisms is inseparable from contexts in which they occur and they observe the Politeness Principle at the expense of certain maxims of the Cooperative Principle.This paper analyzed the euphemisms in Forrest Gump with Cooperation Principle and Politeness Principle. The results of this study can be applied to English teaching and cross-cultural communication so as to minimize mutual misunderstandings and avoid interpersonal conflicts.