A Study Of The Cultural-Cognitive Mechanism Of English Political Euphemisms

Political euphemisms are an common language phenomenon in political events, especially the political speeches. They can indicate politicians' implied political attitudes obliquely and avoid speaking of some sensitive topics. Thus, they make a big difference in political communication.Scholars at home and abroad hold different opinions on the definition of political euphemisms, but there are few formal definitions recorded in books. On the basis of the common points delivered by foreign and Chinese scholars and a dictionary, the author puts forward a working definition of euphemisms. Euphemisms are indirect words or phrases that people adopt to explain taboos and sensitive topics, which help to facilitate the communication. Then based on the working definition of euphemisms, political euphemisms' definition can be concluded that political euphemisms are the euphemisms that are used in politic activities. They can contribute to express some unfavorable political words, or conduce to make lies sound truthful, to disguise those unpopular political intentions, to defend their actions, and to give the uncompromising diplomatic maneuvers a pure appearance.As an essential part in the political communication, political euphemisms have attracted many linguistic scholars whose researches are carried out from various perspectives including the classifications, the purposes, and the rhetoric devices and so on. Furthermore, they often apply the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics to the analytic processes. However, these studies mainly focus on the usage level of this language phenomenon, and rarely touch the underlying cognitive mechanisms and the cultural causes in the production of political euphemisms. They also ignore the users of political euphemisms.So based on the previous studies, this thesis takes American presidents' inaugural addresses as its linguistic data and tries to analyze the metonymy mechanism behind euphemisms in the political speeches under the specific cultural backgrounds. In this thesis, Radden & K?vecses 's metonymy models will be used. They creatively divide metonymy-producing relationships into two parts, including the whole ICM and its parts and parts of an ICM. The first part consists of 7 kinds, while the latter one is made up of 10 kinds. This thesis tries to combine these 17 kinds with the sociolinguistic concept “identity” to interpret political euphemisms. In the end, the true communicative purposes and generation mechanism behind political euphemisms will be revealed by explaining the relationship among linguistics, cognition and culture.American presidents' inaugural addresses can be said to be one of the most classical political speeches. So the ten speeches selected in this study are the latest ten presidents' inaugural speeches, varying from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address to Barack Obama's second inaugural address. And 379 political euphemisms can be found in the ten addresses based on the working definition. Radden, G. & K?vecses, Z.'s metonymy theory, the “identity” theory and the specific cultural backgrounds would work together to help to analyze political euphemisms. And then, the conclusion can be drawn as follows: the emergence of political euphemisms is not by chance, because they are deeply rooted in the culture. As one of people's important cognitive mechanisms, metonymy mechanism and specific cultural backgrounds influence the interpretation of the meanings of political euphemisms together. In the end, some limitations have also been pointed out for future studies.