| Euphemism,as a linguistic phenomenon,widely exists in all cultures and is widely used no matter which era or which cultural background people live in.In everyday life,the application of euphemisms can not only appropriately reflect the civilization and tact of using language,helping people to better interpersonal relationships,but also mirror the morality and values of a society.In our more and more civilized society,euphemism is part and parcel of language in interpersonal and intercultural communication,thus having been researched by many scholars both home and abroad from multiple angles with great research achievements.It is well known that “literature comes from life and is higher than life” which means the application of euphemisms in literary works has the same effect with that in real life.Emma,Jane Austen's great novel,is considered the most mature one,and gains abundant attention at home and abroad.Many researches have been done on Emma from the perspective of literary criticism theory,but little has been done from the linguistic perspective.This thesis takes the utterances in the novel Emma as the research text to make an analysis of euphemisms from the perspective of Verschueren's adaptation theory,pointing out that euphemism choices in the novel is the result of adaptation of communicators when facing specific communicating situations such as the linguistic context and non-linguistic context(communicative context).The former adaptation includes adaptation to code,style and modality while the latter one is only focused on the mental world and the social world because of the limitation of the research text and the infinite knowledge of the author.The research has both theoretical and practical significances.On the one hand,it provides another new angle to study novel language,broadening the scope of euphemism study and deepening people's understanding of euphemisms.On the other hand,it can help the readers appreciate literary works from more angles. |
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