A Pragmatic Study Of English Euphemism And Its Implications

The use of euphemism is a common language phenomenon in the communications ofhuman being. Proper euphemism usage can avoid embarrassment or displeasure and hence helpto achieve successful interpersonal communications. Euphemism has attracted linguists’vastinterest for a long time. They have analyzed and discussed euphemism from different aspects andhave extended euphemism study to various fields like linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology,pragmatics, and so on. Based on these research achievements, this paper tried to studyeuphemism from the perspective of pragmatics and presented some enlightenment on Englishlanguage teaching.The author first redefined euphemism as a basic linguistic concept; then explored anddiscussed its construction, classification, characteristics and social functions from the aspects ofphonetics, semantics and syntax; and then from pragmatics aspect, analyzed that the usage ofeuphemism violates the cooperative principle but follows the politeness principle and face theory;and finally, the author put more focus on presenting the great importance of euphemism inEnglish language teaching.Since euphemism plays such a big role in prompting language teaching, the author tried todesign an English euphemism teaching model suitable for today’s career education high schoolstudents, which adopts euphemism into daily English teaching with the purpose to developstudents’cross-cultural awareness and communication ability through better understanding andusing of euphemism.In Chapter 3, the author focused discussion on this teaching model. It consists of two parts:subconscious teaching and indoctrinatory teaching. In subconscious teaching, teachers takeeuphemisms as a teaching method, using them in the communications with students in or afterclass. In indoctrinatory teaching, euphemisms being part of the teaching content, teachers teachstudents knowledge of euphemisms clearly and systematically by employing certain strategiessuch as lecture, appreciation, activities and practice. In order to test the effectiveness of thisteaching model, the author carried out a one-year teaching experiment from 2010.2 to 2011.2 ontwo parallel classes from accounting major in the Business department of our School. They arenamed as experiment class and control class. Subconscious teaching and indoctrinatory teachingwere carried out in experiment class simultaneously while only subconscious teaching was carried out in control class. The experiment result showed that it is far from enough to rely onsubconscious teaching. The teaching model with combination of subconscious teaching andindoctrinatory teaching in experiment class received very good result: students’sense ofeuphemism and ability of cross-cultural communication were improved significantly. In addition,this paper has also concluded: the purpose of English teaching is to improve students’communication ability in English; English language teaching includes English languageknowledge teaching as well as English cultural knowledge teaching; and as part of Englishcultural knowledge, euphemism plays an important role in English teaching.In summary, improving cross-cultural communication ability of students has become ageneral concern and research focus among educators. This article tried to build a learning pathfor todays` career education high school students by developing a suitable euphemism teachingmodel. It started research from a new perspective and has achieved preliminary success. Theauthor hopes the result can bring inspirations to peers and provides some experiences andmethods for reference.