A Study On English Euphemism And Its Teaching In The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

As a common linguistic phenomenon and a very part of language, euphemism plays a significantly important role in people's everyday communication. However, investigations showed that Chinese learners know little about English euphemism, not mention to comprehend and learn it correctly and effectively. Fortunately, some scholars realized the seriousness of the problem in English euphemism teaching in China and have done some researches from the perspective of traditional linguistics, sociolinguistic and pragmatics and etc., nevertheless, few of which revealed cognitive structures of English Euphemism underlying the various surface constructions. With the introduction of Cognitive Linguistics, much attention has been paid to researches on English euphemism based on cognitive theories, including Category and Prototype Theory, Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy theory, Conceptual Integration Theory and Blend Space theory. Although have explained the internal meaning construction of some of euphemisms, literature available indicates that few of these theories can cover English euphemisms completely and systematically, and few of these studies applies its findings to English euphemism teaching. This thesis, therefore, conducts a relatively systematic study on the exploration of cognitive mechanisms of English euphemisms underlying the surface constructions and then attempt to apply the findings to its teaching in the perspective of Frame Semantics.Fillmore maintains that Frame Semantics renders us not only"a particular way of looking at word meanings", but also"a way of characterizing principles for creating new words and phrases, for adding new meanings to words". Several concepts of the theory including frame, frame elements, frame systems, subframes, framing, frame borrowing are adopted as the theoretical framework of this thesis to explain the cognitive mechanisms of English euphemisms, based on which English euphemism teaching is probed.Based on the formation of the lexical semantic devices, English euphemisms firstly have been classified into eight sub-devices in traditional linguistics. Compared with these eight traditional sub-devices, five cognitive mechanisms are proposed, i.e. frame downgrading, frame upgrading, frame element transferring, framing and frame borrowing, on the basis of analysis of the linguistic data collected from an English euphemism dictionary and the English newspapers.In light of the above findings in the perspective of Frame Semantics, a tentative teaching model of three stages on English euphemism teaching is put forward: the first stage, locating the frame of the euphemized forms by evoking the background knowledge of the text and the frame knowledge of the linguistic forms; the second stage, inferring the possible change of frames and identifying the prior-euphemizing frame and the third stage, consolidating the connection between the prior-euphemizing frame and the euphemized one by practicing in a virtual or real situation. According to this teaching model, four implications are thus are brought up: presenting students frame knowledge, analyzing English euphemisms in a context, enriching students'frame knowledge, and practicing euphemistic expressions in any possible situation.