A Study On The Semantic Construal Mechanism Of War Euphemism From The Perspective Of CBT

As a technique to modify language,euphemism has extensively penetrated every corner of contemporary human civilization and cultural livelihood.Politicians utilize the loopholes in public ideological systems to whitewash their rhetoric,wantonly provoke violent aggression under the banner of so-called humanitarianism.Under the frequent conflicts in international diplomacy,the expression pattern of war euphemism,which is a circuitous language strategy,has gradually evolved into a novel linguistic focus.The establishment of a systematic construal mechanism to decode war euphemism is an impetus to reveal the aggressors' ideology of anti-humanitarianism and build up the information tie between war and peace.To uncover evil intention and merciless massacre of war,the thesis deeply excavates the semantic construal mechanism of war euphemism from the perspective of CBT.Fauconnier proposes CBT and believes that blending involves a series of cognitive activities that selectively combine frames from diverse cognitive domains.Disserting war euphemism by CBT networks not only makes cognitive procedures of semantic processing visible but also widens the application dimension of CBT.Based on CBT,this thesis constructs a tight ideological system for the euphemism construal.Major findings are demonstrated here.Firstly,the thesis elaborates on taxonomy mechanism for war euphemism by literature research.Combining Chen Chuchu's statistics and approach with coverage of euphemisms,the thesis divides war euphemism into four categories: euphemisms in the weapon category,military strategy category,death category,and soldier category.Scientific euphemism classification provides theoretical prerequisites for its construal.Secondly,from the perspective of CBT,the thesis probes into the semantic construal mechanism of war euphemism.The simplex,mirror,single-scope,and double-scope networks are employed in the thesis for systematic and intuitive schema construction.Meanwhile,the thesis adopts the comparative method to contrast the convergence and divergence between the four models in a brief way.Thirdly,the thesis depicts an uneven distribution of the four integrated models in the course of semantic interpretation upon four categories of war euphemisms.Single-scope network demonstrates intensive flexibility and explanatory power.It would be widely distributed in the interpretation of euphemisms under four categories.Fourthly,the thesis excavates the internal characteristics upon the semantic construal mechanism of the four categories of war euphemisms.Euphemisms in the military strategy category which are illustrated by the double-scope network have a large integration span.The thesis attempts to establish a complete semantic construal system to fill the vacancies in information and ideology and to build a bridge between the reader and the cruel truth hidden behind the war euphemism.Fifthly,the thesis explicates the filtering process of elements in input spaces during their selective projection to the blended space.Sixthly,based on metonymy and CBT,it innovatively proposes a multi-level construal model from dual perspectives and explicates the cross relationship between metonymy and CBT,to provide a cognitive point for cross-domain exploration.The thesis realizes the externalization of abstract mapping and integration of cases by vivid graphic illustration,after selecting euphemisms from news in COCA,military journals,and A Dictionary of English Euphemisms by Liu Chunbao.Scanning semantic construal mechanisms of war euphemism constructed by CBT models,people find that single-scope network occurs at the highest frequency,double-scope network model is the most complex,while the mirror and simplex network rarely emerge.For euphemisms in weapon category,they are mostly constructed by the frames derive from animal,natural phenomenon,myth,and superordinate concepts domains.Euphemisms resemble their referents but do not have the semantic characteristics of derogation or negation in war domain.The negative factors go through semantic transformation by the positive factors under the cognitive domain represented by blended space.The semantic transformation,fuzzification,expansion,and narrowing are manifested in examples,thus the psychological distance between literal meanings and referents that they signify is extended.People construct corresponding conceptual packages,which would lure them to perceive an illusion of peace.Ultimately,the thesis innovatively contrasts the cognitive model and integrated network towards an individual euphemism to pioneer a new ideological path for cross-domain and multi-dimensional semantic explication.