A Study Of The Euphemistic Language In"Harry Porter"

As a special linguistic form, euphemism can be seen as a kind of "lubricating oil" during communication. It is also a sort of mild, vague or polite expression. With the development of human civilization, euphemism has become an absolutely necessary element in everyone’s interactions. It can be seen anywhere during our communication. Thus, euphemism has been studied by plenty of scholars and linguists from different aspects:definition, formation and classification theory. But, most of the scholars’ analyses of "Harry Potter" are confined to the perspectives of rhetoric or translation. In this paper, on the basis of the research achievements done by the former scholars, we try to further study this world’s well-known science fiction from different aspects. Furthermore, this paper intends to collect euphemism data from different characters’ conversations under different scenarios, and draw a conclusion by a method of qualitative analysis under the angle of pragmatics. The euphemism of culture phenomenon and humor of language which come from our age also are studied in this paper. We can find out people can use euphemism to improve communication skills properly to avoid unnecessary awkwardness and obstacles. Because euphemisms can not only promote everyone’s communication, but also can bring humor implication to a conversation. The purpose of this paper is trying to enlarge the scope of euphemism from pragmatic perspective of humor implication and politeness on the theory of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle.This paper consists of five chapters. First of all, Chapter one is an introduction to the whole thesis, which includes research background, research purpose, the content and organization of the thesis. Chapter two gives a review of English euphemism, which includes the definition of the euphemism, the research status at home and abroad, the development, classifications and formation of the English euphemism. Chapter three, the main part of the thesis, gives a detailed analysis of the euphemistic language in Harry Porter from the pragmatic perspective. This science fiction series abound in many euphemistic expressions in the interaction among the main characters, which provides sufficient language data for studying euphemisms from the perspective of characters’ euphemism in the fiction. The whole fiction mainly talks about how Harry Potter defeats the forces of darkness. Besides, the main character’s modesty and politeness have provided a great opportunity to study English euphemism. A series of the examples are quoted to analyze the language features of the English euphemism. Chapter four is based on the classification and the functions of euphemism, offering the pragmatics factors illustrating how euphemism is observed or violated CP and PP in the conversations and see how the euphemism presents the characteristics of the modern factors. The most important part is that the thesis can be found that the science fiction’s language characters are based on the research of euphemism. Finally, euphemism in this novel is the best way to show politeness and humor, making the conversation more fluent to push forward the scenarios. Chapter five contains the short conclusion of the whole thesis, limitations of the paper, suggestions to the reality, the orientation for further study in the future.This thesis studies the illustrative sentences from seven series of Harry Potter in the perspective of euphemism, aiming to indicate that in the process of studying the politeness and indirectness of euphemism, we can find out that the humorous effect and influences of conversations from the angle of a fiction novel which is famous all over the world can be discussed to enlarge the scope of pragmatic study. The author aims to find out the cause for the popularity of Harry Potter from the perspective of lexical, grammatical and rhetorical instead of studying from translation and movie literature.