A Pragmatic Study Of English Euphemism In Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Euphemism, as a universally employed linguistic strategy in dailycommunication, has attracted the attention of many researchers both in China andwestern countries. Studies of euphemisms are mainly concerned with ontologicalexplorations on the definition, classification, formation and functions and translationof euphemisms from a wide range of perspectives, such as rhetorics, semantics,pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social psychology and so on, among which one of themost frequently conducted studies is the pragmatic analysis of euphemisms based onsuch traditional pragmatic theories as the cooperative principle, politeness principleand face theory. In recent years, pragmatic studies of euphemisms have been switchedto those based on the adaptation theory created by Verschueren.Verschueren put forward a new perspective on pragmatics, treating it as a generalcognitive, social and cultural integration on language use. The core concept of“pragmatic perspective” is Adaptation Theory which provides a comprehensivetheoretical framework for linguistic analysis. The adaptation theory treats languageuse as a continuous making of negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range ofpossibilities to adapt to a series of contextual correlates including linguistic contextand communicative context which is further divided into language users, social,physical and mental world. Based on Adaptation Theory and previous studies ofeuphemisms, this paper mainly deals with the choice-making and adaptation ofeuphemisms to pragmatic functions and communicative context.Euphemisms to be analyzed in this thesis are selected from the first three seasonsof a popular American TV series Desperate Housewives. To have a full understandingof the choice-making of euphemisms in this TV series, both a quantitative andqualitative study have been carried out. A corpus analysis toolkit “antconc3.2” is usedto obtain the frequencies of euphemistic expressions on the most frequently mentioned subjects “sex and love”,“divorce”,“death” and “bathrooms”, the results ofwhich show that the most often chosen euphemisms are, in general, conventional onesand those less chosen are usually less conventional or unconventional ones. Inaddition, the choice-making of euphemism is divided, according to its formation, intophonetic, grammatical, lexical, semantic and pragmatic levels, which lays afoundation for the analysis of the adaptation process of euphemisms.To illustrate the adaptation process of euphemisms, most of the selectedeuphemisms are unconventional euphemisms formed though semantic and pragmaticmeans. The employment of euphemisms is seen as an adaptation to such pragmaticfunctions as evasive function of avoiding uttering tabooed expressions, politenessfunction of showing respect for and saving the face of others, cosmetic function ofcovering up unpleasant facts and as an adaptation to communicative context. Choicesof euphemisms should be inter-adapted dynamically with language users (the utterers’voices and interpreters’ roles), mental world (language users’ personality traits,motivation and emotion), social world (social conventions, social values and socialrelationships) and physical world (time, space, physical position and materialconditions). The adaptation process is considered to be dynamic and bidirectional asnot only should the linguistic choices of euphemisms be adapted to context but alsocontext can be mobilized, manipulated and even created by language users to adapt tolinguistic choices.This paper is of both theoretical and practical value. Theoretically, it proves thatAdaptation Theory is a good theoretical framework for the comprehensive study ofeuphemisms. Practically, it gives some valuable implications for cross-culturalcommunication and TEFL. The author sincerely hopes that this study will be helpfulto Chinese English learners.