ABSTRACT
The word “Euphemism” originated from Greek. With the prefix “eu” meaning fine, favorable or nicely-sounded, and “pheme” meaning speech, the word as a whole conveys the meaning of proper or felicitous speech. As an indispensable part of English vocabulary, euphemism has received an incessant attention from people and constant study from linguists.
During the last few decades, many scholars have made various studies of euphemism from different aspects, which were so brilliant that they are still cherished these days. However there still exist some limitations in terms of completeness and depth of the studies. The previous studies are confined to the level of rhetoric and sociolinguistics. The linguistic phenomenon of euphemism itself is focused on, whereas the motives of the speaker’s using euphemism is to some extent neglected. People seldom make language communication without specific purposes. In order to achieve their purposes, they usually adopt some linguistic means and methods, which are inclusive of euphemisms. Therefore, it’s real need for us to study euphemism from the perspective of pragmatics.
Therefore, this thesis tries to analyze euphemism from the pragmatic perspective and propose a hypothesis that when people use a euphemistic expression in communication, they choose not to cooperate, for they want to show their politeness to other person. They tend to use euphemism is to violate the cooperative principle and maintain the politeness principle. In order to verify this hypothesis, the author first discusses the pragmatic principles that can be used to analyze the euphemism and then offer a pragmatic analysis of euphemistic examples which are labeled according to Neaman & Silver’s classification.
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature review on euphemism 3
2.1 Definition and classification of euphemism 3
2.1.1 Definition of euphemism 3
2.1.2 Classification of euphemism 4
2.2 General review of the study on euphemism 5
2.3 Pragmatic study on euphemism 6
3. Pragmatic analysis of euphemism 8
3.1 The cooperative principle and euphemism 9
3.1.1 The violation of the maxim of quality 10
3.1.2 The violation of the maxim of quantity 11
3.1.3 The violation of the maxim of relevance 12
3.1.4 The violation of the maxim of manner 12
3.2 The politeness principle and euphemism 13
3.2.1 Face theory 13
3.2.2 The politeness principle 14
4. Pragmatic analysis of euphemism on the basis of Neaman & Silver’s eleven categories 17
4.1 Parts of the body: forbidden territory 17
4.2 Parts of the body: neutral territory 18
4.3 Blood, sweet & tears: secretion, excretion & bathrooms 18
4.4 The seven deadly sins & sundry peccadilloes 19
4.5 Sickness: fear & trembling 19
4.6 Death 20
4.7 Crime & punishment 20
4.8 Sex: amateur & professional 21
4.9 Placement & outplacement: the word of work 21
4.10 The language of government: bureaucratese and urbababble 22
4.11 The game of war: the players, the props, the strategies 22
5. Conclusion 24
Acknowledgements 25
References 26
