| As a kind of language strategy, euphemisms have been one of the most significantresearch objects in linguistics owing to their unique functions, which have been studied fromthe perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguisticsby scholars both at home and abroad, and the achievements are quite considerable. Militaryeuphemisms, being a special kind of euphemism, possess peculiar political and militarymotivations besides having those fundamental functions of common euphemisms. Generallyspeaking, they are made up of the applications of neutral words, nicknames of weapons, codenames for military operations and initialisms. The widened semantic meaning and the indirectsemantic meaning are the main features of military euphemisms. The applications of commoneuphemisms are mainly to avoid mentioning tabooed things while those of militaryeuphemisms serve principally to hide and to glorify the wars. For example, collateral damageis adopted to refer to civilian death in a war; Black Hawk is employed to name a kind ofhelicopter; the naked aggression is described as “Just Cause”; weapon of mass destruction isusually called WMD, and so forth. Glossaries of military euphemisms have been edited bysome foreign scholars according to the reports on the Iraq War, yet the systematic researcheson them in China are quite scarce compared with these in foreign countries. The relatedresearches on military euphemisms in China only focus on their semantic features andpragmatic functions, which are difficult to convince people for the reason that the studies arelacking in credible examples. Having analyzed euphemisms from the perspective of cognitivelinguistics, some academics tried to explore the generative mechanism of euphemisms.However, it is difficult for them to adopt a unified theory framework to support theirassumptions. This thesis aims at making a tentative analysis on the underlying generativemechanism of military euphemisms in the framework of denotation-connotation inheritance proposed by Chinese linguist Xu Shenghuan.Denotation-connotation inheritance provides a new perspective on the study of metaphorand metonymy. Xu Shenghuan argues that the core principle of metaphor and metonymy is“The Target is the Source”, which may be reduced in the form of “A is B”. Supposing that twowords or phrases in a sentence involve the relation of “A is B”, there will be inheritancerelation between them, no matter A is explicit or not. The meaning of “Inheritance” is that Acuts its denotational or connotational contents into segments, and selects the suitable one,passing over to the word or phrase that can represent concept B according to the context. Theprocess is a kind of psychological feeling rather than physical events sharing inheritablerelation in the real world. Denotation-connotation inheritance involves four inheritancepatterns: the inheritance pattern of position, property, origin and function.The analysis on military euphemisms in this thesis, adopting a cognitive framework withqualitative analysis and quantitative analysis as the main analytical method, attempts to builda unified analytical model, aiming at providing an elaborate analysis and exploring theprocess of production of military euphemisms. The data collected in this thesis are mainlyfrom the news of mainstream media in the U.S. and Britain. Besides, the thesis also makesreference to two dictionaries of euphemisms and several websites. Military euphemisms areclassified into the Military, Armaments and Strategies according to the data collected in thethesis. The detailed analyses on military euphemisms are made first according to fourinheritance patterns of denotation-connotation inheritance. Following this, the thesisconcludes that denotation-connotation inheritance can be reputed as the foundation of thegenerative mechanism of military euphemisms and military euphemisms result from thesuitable denotational or connotational contents transmitted by the original words or phrases. |
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