| English euphemism has long been one of hot topics in pragmatic research. It is mainly studied from the perspective of pragmatics, social culture and human psychology. Few people study English euphemism from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. However, this paper will focus on English euphemism from the point of view of syntactic iconicity in the field of cognitive linguistics, which is aimed at finding any characteristics of the non-arbitrariness of language. Iconicity is the study of the similarity between linguistic form or structure and the concept or conceptual structure it represents. It can be regarded as a sort of analysis and study of language phenomena from a microscopic perspective. The form, length, complexity, or interrelationship of elements in a linguistic representation reflects the form, length, complexity, or interrelationship of elements in the concept, experience or communicative strategy that the representation encodes. The relationship between form and concept is to a large extent iconically motivated. Linguistic form is a reflection of cognition and experience.Syntactic iconicity includes distance iconicity, order iconicity and quantity iconicity(Haiman John, 1980:112)Distance iconicity means that a formal distance between elements corresponds to the conceptual distance between them. The distance iconicity of English euphemism is mainly manifested at syntactic and morphologic levels. In syntax, its expressions are in transferred negation, coordination, interclausal relation, to-or from-marked construction, head-last NP and social distance. In morphology, the expressions of distance iconicity are in inflection and NP. Order iconicity means that the order of linguistic form or text structure corresponds to... |
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