| Euphemism is a sort of language phenomenon which widely exists in human communication and is a kind of language form which is created to achieve ideal communication in social interaction. For years, many linguists and scholars have studied the euphemism from many perspectives including culture, semantics, rhetoric,psychology, pragmatics and semantics etc. Their researches have an important effect on the description, usage and interpretation of euphemism. But most of researchers studied the euphemism in a broad sense; few of them studied it within a specific field. Moreover,most of their studies were mainly theory-oriented rather than empirical studies, so their researches lack adequate evidence to support.Euphemism refers to many aspects in social life and it can be classified into many types in accordance with different standards. Political euphemism is a kind of euphemism which is classified by register. Because of its many important pragmatic functions including replacing taboos, expressing politeness and cheating someone and so on, political euphemism is widely used by many governments including American government. In consequence, it is very necessary and important to analyze the political euphemism in a deeper level. Politeness is a symbol of human civilization and is an important criterion of human social activities. Given its importance, this paper will focus on the study of political euphemism’s polite function.In consequence, this paper will base on the politeness principle and the cooperative principle to analyze 8 articles chosen from the mainstream news media and authoritative journal—the Washington post. After a systemic and meticulous analysis of these articles,this paper aims to find out the political euphemism in news report is how to observe the politeness principle and the strategies used to achieve politeness, helping people to improve the ability to understand the news report in a comprehensive way and helping people to avoid communication barriers. |
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