An Analysis Of Foreign Language Euphemism

The definition of diplomatic euphemism in this paper is as following: It refers to those words or sentences used when the diplomatic personnel discuss some events or points of view between countries or regions and they tries to avoid mentioning them directly in order to achieve ideal communication. Hence, they will employ some ways that don't denote the events or points of view directly. There are many ways of forming diplomatic euphemism, such as the way in cultural, historical, psychological and in lingual. This paper begins with the lingual level of diplomatic euphemism in modern Chinese and tries to classify the ways of formation of diplomatic euphemism completely.The two main clues of the paper are the means of formation of the diplomatic euphemism internally and externally. The corpus is chosen mainly from the transcripts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs's spokesman at press conferences from June to October in 2005, meanwhile, it analyzes the lingual means of diplomatic euphemism with typical examples in diplomatic occasion. It aims to explore the grammar, trope, means of semantic and features of pragmatic both from internal and external perspective. The former is the static research of the inner formation from lingual perspective while the later analyzes the pragmatic characteristics of diplomatic euphemisms dynamically combining psychology, culture and society etc. Therefore, we can have a better systematic and objective understanding of diplomatic euphemism in foreign affairs both macroscopically and microcosmically.Diplomatic euphemism is always the issue which has being studied by linguists and anthropologists. The content and perspective studied by the scholars vary from era to era. To begin with, this paper expounds the achievements of both Chinese and western scholars studies on euphemism. It is considered that although the studies have a range from the originality, definition, classification and hue hierarchy of ancient Chinese euphemism in social to the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, rhetorical and cultural aspects of modern euphemism, the studies on diplomatic euphemism are not enough and it lacks of the systematical analyses. Consequently, it becomes significant to analyze the language structure of diplomatic euphemism. Then the author analyzes diplomatic euphemism from the four frequently used lingual methods that is the lexical,...