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A Cross-Linguistic Study on Euphemisms in Chinese, English & Japanese

Author: GuanZuo
Tutor: ZhangXiangMing
School: Qingdao University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Cross-linguistic Pragmatic Study Euphemism Verbal Taboo Cooperative Principle
CLC: H313;H36
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 115
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Abstract


Euphemism is mild, agreeable, or roundabout words used in place of coarse, painful, or offensive ones. The term comes from the Greek, eu meaning ’well’ or ’sounding good’ and pheme meaning ’speech’. Euphemism literally means good or pleasant speech. Euphemism, as a culture-loaded term, reflects a nation’s historical development and its changes in politics, economics, culture and ideology from a unique visual angle. Euphemism is a common language strategy in communication. Almost everyone uses euphemism consciously or subconsciously everyday. People use euphemism with various intentions and for various purposes.People use euphemism extensively in one’s life. Euphemism has become an indispensable part in Chinese, English and Japanese vocabulary and one of the major means to convey meaning and intention in daily communication. Euphemism plays a crucial role in keeping harmonious social relationships by substituting taboos and conveying implicatures. Previous researches done at home and abroad on the generation and understanding of euphemism from multi-dimensional perspectives have offered a reference model for people to fully understand the phenomenon of euphemism.Euphemism is a common linguistic as well as cultural phenomenon in daily life. It oils the human relationship in communication and helps to save face of communicators. As an indispensable and natural part of language, euphemism has been arousing wide interest and existed for a long time. The appearance of everything, including euphemism, has its reasons. The emergence of euphemism has a close relation with language taboos and religion. Since euphemism plays an important role in social communication, it is worth careful and thorough study. Many linguists and scholars have studied this linguistic phenomenon from the perspectives of rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguists. As a result, achievements in the study of euphemism have been conspicuous. This paper will mainly deal with the formation, classification and social function of euphemism. Based on the former studies, the author constructs a new framework within which the ananalysis of euphemism is conducted from a comparative pragmatic perspective. It is found that euphemism flouts some maxims of the Cooperative Principle in order to observe the Evasion, Politeness, Elegance and Disguise functions, hence to save faces of all. At the same time, the article tries to find a new path in euphemism study by comparing English Euphemism with both Chinese and Japanese ones.

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