A Study On College English Majors’Acquisition Of English Euphemisms

Euphemism is one of universal language phenomena which provides an important approach to improve the communicative effects and maintain harmonious interpersonal relationship. With the rapid promotion of human civilization and development of cross-cultural communication, euphemism is performing more indispensable functions and has become a spectacular landscape in communicative language. It is not difficult and troublesome for college English majors to proficiently use Chinese euphemisms. However, whether they could accurately and fluently employ English euphemisms needs researching. This thesis, from the perspective of pragmatics, presents a profound study and elaborate analysis of college English majors’ acquisition of English euphemisms, summarizes the problems reflected from the research and provides tentative solutions.The researcher takes77third-year English majors from Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University as the research subjects and38foreign students from English-speaking countries, as the control group. The research adopts qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, which includes using questionnaires and interviews. There are altogether five parts in the questionnaire. The first part investigates the frequency of using English euphemisms, reasons and categories of the words which they frequently prefer to employ euphemisms for. The second part and the third part, each of which contains ten questions, explore the comprehension and judgment of English euphemisms. There are ten types of commonly-used words chosen from the dictionary compiled by Liu Chunbao and the book written by Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver. The design of fourth part and fifth part is developed in the frame of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and has been made appropriate modifications in order to create more authentic scenes and meet the demands of this research. This research is conducted with Face-saving Theory of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson as the theoretical framework and divides the scenes where the faces of the hearers are threatened and euphemisms are consequently needed to be applied into four types:requesting, advising, criticizing, and refusing. The fourth part has ten multiple-choice questions and the fifth part consists of ten open questions. The researcher classified and made comparison with the answers from both the English majors and foreign students on the basis of the politeness redressive strategies of Brown and Levinson.The results of the survey have explicitly displayed:1) the English majors performed fairly well in the comprehension and recognition of English euphemisms;2) the frequency of English majors’employing euphemisms is much lower than that of the foreign students;3) in requesting behaviors, the euphemisms delivered by the foreign students are more euphemistic and polite, but the situation is absolutely the opposite with the communication with parents; in advising behaviors, the English majors are more courteous and tactful while the foreign students are comparatively more direct; in the speech acts of criticizing and refusing, both of them are developing similar politeness redressive strategies;4) there are pragmatic transfers existing in the English majors’application of English euphemisms which include pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer.This thesis aims to arouse the attention of both teachers and students to the problems and pragmatic transfer manifested by the research and provides timely guidance for English teaching and cross-cultural communication.