A Study On The Relevance Theory In The Interpretation Of English Euphemism As A Communication Mode

English euphemism has become one of the major means to convey meaning and intention in daily communication. It 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 English euphemisms from multi-dimensional perspectives have offered a reference model for people to fully understand the phenomenon of euphemism. Based on the findings of previous studies, this thesis attempts to analyze and explain the process of the generation and interpretation of euphemisms by using the ostensive-inferential model in Relevance Theory. The author intends to interpret euphemism from two perspectives, the perspective of the role of communicators as cognitive subjects in communication and the perspective of cognitive context.This thesis first reviews the studies on the interpretation of utterance in communication in the field of pragmatics. The semiologists represented by De Saussure propose the code model to explain utterance in human communication. According to the code model, communication is a process of encoding and decoding messages. This model can explain how communication is conducted; however, it cannot fully describe the complicated phenomena in communication. Later, Austin and Searle put forward the Speech Acts Theory to explain utterance in communication. The Cooperative Principle and its coordinate maxims proposed by Grice make a further step in the explanation of conversational implicature, and contribute to the proposal of the Relevance Theory. Similarly, it has some shortcomings in the theoretical construction. The Speech Acts Schema put forward by Bach et al. marks a new development in Speech Acts Theory and Conversational Implicature Theory. In short, all these theories have made some contributions to the interpretation of utterance. However, the defects in them are obvious, that is, they lack the cognitive background and ignore the role of communicators as cognitive subjects in communication. Although these theories have introduced the notion of context in the explanation mechanism, they view it as static and given. In comparison, Relevance Theory, by absorbing the essences of previous studies, proposes the ostensive-inferential model, which takes optimal relevance of the conversation as thebasis of inference. The ostensive-inferential model holds that communicators, as cognitive subjects, play an active role in the process of inferring conversational impHcature. Besides, cognitive context, as a set of dynamic and chosen lexical information and the aggregation of the encyclopedia and logical information, is a mental process that communicators construct all the time.Based on this, the thesis examines the generation device, motives and the operation device of euphemism and points out the confusion in the inference of euphemism brought about by the complicatedness of these devices. The characteristics of euphemism lie in that communicators resort to abstract, ambiguous notions or figurative, commendatory means to talk about the matter that is not fit to be mentioned directly and consequently they will not feel guilty or embarrassed. Since Relevance Theory suggests that pragmatic inference is virtually a process of bridging the gap between the supplemented semantic representation and information blank in the context, it well justifies why it is possible for people to understand impHcature. This thesis expounds the implicature of euphemism from the perspective of Relevance Theory. By analyzing English euphemism produced in the forms of figurative device, phonetic device, lexical device and grammatical device respectively, the thesis verifies the role of Relevance Theory in the explanation of the implicature of English euphemism.