A Pragmatic Study Of English Euphemisms From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Treated as lubricants, English euphemisms have been put into widespread use with roundabout and pleasant words. The employment of euphemisms helps alleviate tense situation and shun unnecessary conflicts so as to achieve communicative goals. Therefore, euphemism is not only a vital and effective communicative strategy, but also a language art, aiming to promote communicative effects. Up to now, there are many scholars paying more attention to it and attempt to explore it from different fields, like rhetoric, semantics, sociolinguistics, literature translation, etc. Those research results do really make great contributions to language understanding and usage, while there is no denying that those studies from the perspective of semantics, lexicology and syntax are restricted in a static stage without comprehensive interpretation for euphemism. For expanding the research scope of linguistics, this thesis carries out a dynamic and comprehensive study on English euphemisms with Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren as the theoretical foundation.Based on it, the first purpose of this study is to find out what kind of dynamic contextual correlates that mainly influence the employment of English euphemisms. And then According to theses contextual correlates, the second purpose aims to explore the adaptation process of euphemisms, which is the generative mechanism of euphemisms. Finally, based on the adaptation generation process, this thesis explains how communicative effects are improved and points out the main pragmatic functions euphemisms perform.This thesis employs a qualitative analysis. At first, it selects and classifies typical examples from newspaper, literary works and dictionaries. Secondly, due to the popularity and widespread application of English euphemism, this thesis focuses on its generative mechanism and pragmatic functions, mainly conducting from linguistic context and communicative context, then exploring the adaptation process of English euphemisms to explain how English euphemisms adapt to contextual variants so as to improve communicative effects. Finally, on the basis of the detailed analysis of typical data, this thesis shows that the choices of English euphemisms are made at every possible level and they are deeply influenced by various contextual correlates. In linguistic context, the employment of euphemisms should adapt to code and style, modality, linguistic channel, and sound structure. In communicative context, the choice of English euphemisms should adapt to contextual correlates of the mental world, the social world and the physical world. The variants of the mental world mainly include language users, emotion, personality, various motivations. The variants of social world involve gender, social status, religion, and value system. The physical world refers to the speaking situations. From the formation mechanism of English euphemisms, the pragmatic functions of euphemism chiefly involve evasive function, politeness function, upgrading function and humorous function. According to these findings, some feasible suggestions are provided for appropriate use of English euphemisms and shed light on cross cultural communication and TEFL.