A Study Of Euphemism From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Euphemism,as a kind of common linguistic phenomenon,plays an important role in harmonizing people's relationship.The expressing and understanding of euphemism is a kind of cognitive process between communicator and audience.As one of the most famous American TV series,there are many euphemisms in Six Friends.In the case of Six Friends,this thesis intends to analyze the euphemistic expressing and understanding from the perspectives of cognition,context and communication,with aims of showing its strong explanatory power for euphemism and making a great contribution for its semantic reasoning.The reasons why we choose Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework are out of the following considerations: firstly,Relevance Theory is produced from the perspective of cognitive-pragmatic,which holds that human's verbal communication is a kind of cognitive activity.Euphemism,which we choose as the research object,is a special case of language communication.Secondly,in terms of this theory,human beings understand utterances according to cognitive assumptions,and the condition for cognitive assumptions is the principle of relevance.Relevance Theory is totally compatible with the communicative principle of euphemism.Only the audience finds out the optimal relevance between utterance and context can he or she infer the implicated meaning of the utterance and achieve the mutual manifestness.Here are some conclusions our research has found out.Firstly,in the process of applying euphemisms,the communicator should depend on the contextual assumption and ensure the relevance and ostension of the utterance.The audience should process the utterance in the right direction and then obtain the contextual effect.Secondly,in the process of applying euphemism,the communicator should make the audience believe that his utterance is optimally relevant in the given context and the utterance deserves processing.Finally,in the process of understanding the euphemisms,the audience has to infer the implicated meaning of the utterance based on all kinds of information in the cognitive environment.However,because of the indirectness of euphemism,the audience may infer the implicated meaning in a wrong way,which will cause a misunderstanding of euphemism and lead to a failure of communication.As far as the practical value is concerned,this study provides not only a cognitive basis for understanding this language phenomenon,but also a theoretical basis for maximizing the expressive effect of euphemism.What's more,the study also provides a good help for people to use euphemism and ensures their smooth communication.