| Euphemisms are roundabout expressions, substituting indirect, vague, pleasant and mild words for more explicit and offensive ones, with the purpose of avoiding taboos, showing elegance or avoiding hurting other people's feelings. They are common phenomena in human language and also strategies of harmonizing interpersonal relationship and smoothing social communication. As Rawson (1995) puts it, euphemisms "are embedded so deeply in our language that few of us, even those who pride themselves on (in) being plain-spoken, ever go through a day without them".Euphemisms are so widely used in social communication that studies on them home and abroad have made considerable achievements under the scopes of rhetoric, lexicography, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, Fuzzy Theory, pragmatics, and so on. However, few researches have been conducted into the scope of cognitive semantics, especially within the framework of Conceptual Integration (Blending) Theory. So the previous studies have not unfolded the cognitive process when euphemisms are used.Conceptual Integration (Blending) is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. From the perspective of semantics, this theory urges the users to break the original semantic convention by describing something or some feelings unusual or even absurd when taken literally. From the aspect of cognitive linguistics, it refers to two mental spaces that are connected by cross-space mapping, and two input spaces that are projected onto a third space, which can be explained dynamically, i.e. the blended space by selective projection. Thus the new conceptual categorization is built, namely, the emergent structure appears.This thesis is a tentative study that focuses on exploring the human cognitive activity and the process of meaning construction in the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory. This study aims to interpret English euphemism from a new perspective.
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