A Study On English Euphemism In Communication From Perspective Of Context Adaptation

Euphemism, as an important linguistic and cultural phenomenon, plays a significant rolein communication. It is a more polite usage when people are talking about somethingunpleasant or embarrassing. Up to now, many scholars at home and abroad have made studieson it from various perspectives and have made a lot of brilliant achievements.But compared with Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren, all these approaches aremore or less not universally acceptable. Euphemism can be regarded as a process of makingchoices consciously or unconsciously during which its application and understanding isdynamically adapted. Since euphemism is a kind of linguistic choice made by language usersto adapt to the context and a linguistic strategy to achieve certain communicative goal, it isnecessary to use Adaptation Theory to make a systematic analysis of it. It is impossible tocollect all euphemisms in languages, so the thesis makes English euphemisms widely used inlife as objectives. Context is called contextual correlates of adaptation which can be classifiedinto linguistic context and communicative context. The communicative context vividlyreflects the dynamic characteristic of Adaptation Theory, so this thesis emphasizes onanalyses on adaptation of euphemism in the communicative context. The communicativecontext has four ingredients: the utterer and interpreter, social world, mental world andphysical world. In order to adapt to the roles of participants, the utterer and interpreter shouldnotice their social positions and social distances; in addition, their attitudes towards the topicin discussion are also very important. The adaptation to the social world includes adapting tothe social norms, social settings and institutions, and cultural conventions. The adaptation tothe mental world can be analyzed mainly from people's motivations toward applyingeuphemism which includes adaptation to the root of mental world and adaptation to themotivation of saving face. The final adaptation in communicative context is the adaptation to the physical world which mainly includes the diachronic change and the synchronic change.Through the analyses of adaptation of euphemism in communicative context, it is found thatsome pragmatic principles should be followed in communication so as to achieve nicer effectwhich include"to be cooperative","to be polite"and"to be self-protective". Besides, thereare some pragmatic strategies which include"ambiguity strategy","the'lie'strategy","redundant strategy"and"beauty strategy".This study indicates that euphemism is the result of dynamically adapting to mentalworld, social world, physical world and other contextual factors in communicative context.We should understand euphemism in a dynamic way in order to make successfulcommunication.