A Study Of Metonymy In English Political Euphemisms

Euphemism is an absolute essential in daily life. It creates art in our dry and dull life, inventing diversity in our single and insipid language. Political euphemism, as a special kind of euphemism, possesses unique political motivations apart from those fundamental functions of euphemism. It can beautify taboos and help people out just like other common euphemisms. It can also disguise ugly things in the political arena and assist politicians in achieving various purposes. Political euphemism, the crystallization of wisdom of human language, is like a huge labyrinth in terms of its richness and variety, deserving to be explored with great concentration. Nevertheless, the academic area has only undertaken many studies on euphemism from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. The study of political euphemism is few.Recently the rise of cognitive linguistics has extremely prompted the development of linguistic studies. Many theories proposed by cognitive linguistics can shed light on the study of those thorny questions left behind for a long time. Conceptual metonymy theory, one of the most potential theories, has solved numerous linguistic puzzles. Different from traditional views on metonymy, this theory holds that metonymy is a conceptual phenomenon and cognitive process. It is another rudimental way of thinking and conceptualizing following the metaphoric way of conceptualization. In the same Idealized Cognitive Model, one conceptual entity provides mental access to the other conceptual entity. This cognitive process enables human beings to conceptualize the complex outside world and organize the systematic language in their mind. Therefore, the study firmly believes that political euphemism, this universal and particular linguistic phenomenon, can be profoundly interpreted by the metonymy theory.The application of conceptual metonymy theory to the formulating analysis of political euphemism is based on the following reason. Simply speaking, conceptual metonymy theory takes origin in the activation of two conceptual entities. Political euphemism happens to be the representation of this activation. The mere difference lies in the fact that one of these two conceptual entities is inhibitive or hard to talk about or intended to cover up something while the other entity is joyful and frequently used. Hence, this study attempts to conduct a thorough analysis of political euphemisms in different linguistic levels. Political euphemisms on the lexical level are the easiest ones to be perceived, which can be analyzed by means of referential, situational and predicational metonymies. Political euphemisms on the grammatical level and textual level are newly developed because they are not in the scope of traditional studies. However, these two types have the enormous potential to be probed into. Referential, illocutionary and predicational metonymies are mainly employed to study political euphemisms on the grammatical level whereas textual metonymy is adopted to those on the textual level.Through our thorough exploration of these political euphemisms, this study reveals that political euphemism is created on the basis of metonymic way of thinking. It is politicians unconsciously grasp this metonymic strategy that they can handle adroitly the political matters. Besides, we should also recognize this strategy so as to obtain a more rational understanding of political euphemism. The integration of the conceptual metonymy theory and political euphemism both proves the feasibility of the practical application of metonymy theory and broadens the horizon of the study of political euphemism.