A Study On The Euphemsims Of The State Of Union Addresses With The Theory Of Metonymy

Nowadays, China’s rise, economic and military has drawn a lot of attention in the world. The US presidents spoke about China more than ever in their State of the Union addresses which are political speeches delivered by the presidents of the United States. Meanwhile, China also focuses on America’s China policy. Therefore, this study is necessary for the reference value and practical application to these scholars who study the Sino-America relations.Euphemism language intends to express the pleasant, blurred and agreeable language serving for certain purposes of speaker instead of direct, obscure and offensive language. At present, there are a large amount of researches on euphemism including different type of text. However, there are few researches on euphemism of the State of Union Addresses with the theory of metonymy. In cognitive linguistic, metonymy is one of the basic characteristics of cognition. Metonymy is a cognitive process in which the vehicle provides mental access to the target within the same idealized cognitive model (ICM).This thesis examines the euphemisms which come from addresses of Barack Hussein Obama and George W. Bush in 21st century. There are totally 12 addresses. In this thesis, the author applies a qualitative approach to analyze the generating mechanism of euphemism based on the producing relationships of metonymy proposed by Kovecses and Radden. It reveals that euphemistic effects in State of Union Addresses are achieved by the working of metonymic cognitive models that a whole stands for a part or vice versa as well as a part stands for another part. The author figures out the distribution of euphemisms in the corpus after a detailed exploration of euphemisms in SUA.118 euphemistic expressions are selected and sorted out from the SUA. There are 76 pieces of euphemisms belong to the model of whole ICM; 42 pieces of euphemisms belong to the model of parts of a whole ICM.In the same idealized models, the high level of metonymy refers to whole ICM standing for its part which takes up 64% in the total number of corpus. The lower level of metonymy refers to part of a whole ICM standing for a whole which take up 36% in the total numbers of corpus. It is proved that the generating of euphemisms is pervasive in SUA. What’s more, we can get acknowledged that most of the euphemism expressions are structured in terms of the high level of metonymy and it has an effect of hiding intention of speakers, shifting hearers’ attention and confusing the public.In a conclusion, the author expounds the hiding purposes and intentions of euphemisms in American presidents’ State Union of Addresses taking the social background and presidents’ mental elements into consideration. And People will be more familiar with American politicians’ communicative strategies and have a better understanding of American politics and internal affairs. Therefore, this study has reference value and practical application to these scholars who study the Sino-America relations.