English Euphemism And Its Application In English Teaching

As an indispensable and natural part of English language, euphemism has long been arousing wide interest. Researches made by linguists and scholars cover different angles, including linguistics, pragmatics, and inter-culture study and so on. However, traditional researches on euphemism mostly focused on the linguistic characteristics, seldom on the pragmatic motivation, and rarely on the application in the specific field. For this reason, the paper attempts to discuss the application of euphemism in English language teaching guided by pragmatic principles.Based on the study on definition, classification, and characteristics of euphemism, the paper analyzes the pragmatic functions and principles underlying the use of euphemism: the use of euphemism violates the Cooperative Principle, and obeys Face Theory and Politeness Principle. Since the euphemism plays an active role in facilitating the second language teaching, the paper lays an emphasis on the study of application of euphemism in English language teaching. It inquires into the factors influencing students' input of euphemisms, analyzes the significance of applying euphemism in teaching, and puts forward some tentative strategies to help the students grasp this language phenomenon, thus improving their basic linguistic competence and communicative competence.In this paper, the author makes survey among non-English majors and English majors. The survey is about face problem, euphemistic expressions, the understanding of culture between Chinese and English. Some methods, such as questionnaire, quantitative analysis and comparison are used in this paper.The paper attempts to call people's attention to the importance of euphemism in our daily communication so as to make better understanding of this linguistic phenomenon. Communication is the most fundamental function of all languages. Successful communication is of great importance in our daily life, and euphemisms ensure us a smooth interaction with other people since the use of euphemism takes others' "face want" into consideration and puts "politeness" in the first place. As is considered above, it is practical and meaningful to introduce knowledge of English euphemisms into our second language teaching.