A Cognitive Analysis Of Political Euphemisms In American Radio Addresses

As a common language phenomenon, euphemism has evolved in the daily life over a long period of time and played a significant role in linguistic and social communication.The studies of euphemism have drawn the attention of many linguists and other scholars who carried out much research on its definitions, origins, formations, social functions, etc,but few have been concerned with the meaning construction and cognitive motivations of euphemism. With the development of cognitive linguistics, the focus on studying euphemism has been gradually shifted to the cognitive perspectives. However, most of the current studies put emphasis on metaphorical analyses in single and incomplete texts with few discussions on the meaning construction and reasoning mechanism of euphemistic expressions.This thesis intends to make a cognitive analysis of meaning construction and reasoning mechanisms of euphemisms in the recent American weekly addresses concerning political issues within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,Conceptual Integration Theory and Framing Theory in cognitive linguistics. It aims to conclude major types of metaphors and demonstrates the underlying values behind the textual frames. The corpus is selected from the radio addresses on politics of Obama's administration from June of 2015 to September of 2016 with nearly 45,100 words. The author combines the qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis in the research where a number of examples are listed with the full explanation of the three cognitive theories in detail.Through the corpus-based study of euphemism, the author firstly draws a conclusion that both Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory are proved to be powerful to explain the cognitive construction of euphemism. Conceptual Metaphor Theory puts emphasis on the mapping between the source domain and the target domain or within a single domain while by means of Conceptual Integration Theory, researchers are able to study the use of euphemism in a dynamic and open-ended structure of network.Secondly, Conceptual Metaphor Theory leads to a cross-domain mapping in which the positive aspects of the source domain are strengthened while the negative aspects of the target domain get weakened so that the euphemistic effect is achieved. In the selected texts,the major types of metaphors are journey metaphor, war metaphor, building metaphor,orientational metaphor, human metaphor, object metaphor, nature metaphor, etc. Thirdly, it is found that Framing Theory can also contribute to a more specific explanation of the cognitive motivations hidden behind political euphemisms. The frames of road and American dream reveal people's courage to pursue happiness and self-development while the importance of empathy in the society can be shown from the frames of unity and disease. Only when the frames activated fit people's internal senses of values can discourses be more appealing and acceptable.