Cognitive Processing Of Chinese Euphemism

Euphemism is a language phenomenon that exists in human languages.As a subcategory of idioms of Chinese nonliteral language,euphemism is unique in the function of euphemizing.Previous studies mainly focused on theoretical studies,such as its definition,classification and meaning construction.However,few researchers have regarded euphemism as a kind of nonliteral language,and tried to investigate its cognitive mechanism by means of experiments.As far as we know that euphemisms are different in their salience of literal meaning as well as that of euphemistic meaning,we try to focus the current study on the processing mechanisms of Chinese euphemisms by means of eye-tracking technique,and compare the difference between literally-salient euphemism and euphemistically-salient euphemism according to their different levels of salience.Therefore this study aims to answer the following three questions: 1)How does salience affect the processing of Chinese euphemism and whether the Graded Salience Hypothesis is able to well account for the processing of Chinese euphemism? 2)What role does context play in Chinese euphemism processing,and how can it influence the processing? 3)How does conventionality play a role in Chinese euphemism processing as these two types of euphemisms are different in conventionality?Taking the above questions into account,an eye-tracking experiment was designed by 2(salient literal meaning(LS)/ salient euphemistic meaning(ES))× 2(literal context(LC)/ euphemistic context(EC))paradigm.The materials for experiment were divided into the regions of interest(ROIs)of context and the ROI of euphemism(Target).Then,the behavioral data(namely,the reaction time to each sentence)and the data from various eye-movement measures including early,intermediate and late periods were collected online and then analyzed,in order to investigate the activation sequence of literal meaning and euphemistic meaning,and the influence of context,as well as the roles played by conventionality.Therefore,for the first question,this study finds that 1)salience is an important factor that affects Chinese euphemism processing from the early to the intermediatestages.The literal meaning of literally-salient euphemism is activated in the first place,while the euphemistic meaning of euphemistically-salient euphemism obtains the initial activation.2)Although the Standard Pragmatic Model(SPM)can explain the processing of LS euphemism,the Graded Salience Hypothesis(GSH)is a more general model that can better account for both LS and ES euphemism processing.For the second question,this study finds that context involves in the processing of both kinds of euphemisms from the early to the late periods,but it affects the two differently.In the early processing period,context exerts priming effects,but it shows stronger effects on ES euphemism compared with LS euphemism.In the intermediate and the late processing periods,LS euphemism is dependent more on context than ES euphemism.Context plays a role of checking the initially activated meaning and then facilitating the generation of the contextually compatible meaning during this time.For the third question,we find that salience has a close relationship with conventionality which facilitates our understanding of how we can have access to the euphemistic meaning of the two kinds of euphemisms.LS euphemism can be regarded as novel euphemism,which accesses the euphemistic meaning by constructing a new mapping between the basic concept and the target concept.However,ES euphemism can be regarded as conventional euphemism and it accesses the euphemistic meaning by directly retrieving the already lexicalized target concept.