A Pragmatic Analysis Of Political Euphemisms On War

Euphemism is a linguistic phenomenon that exists in almost every aspect of human society. It originates from people's awe towards the divinity and has long been connected to tabooed things of every society. Euphemisms, based on different criteria, can be classified into different categories. Among all the types, the political euphemisms on warfare are the focus of this thesis.Politics is, in nature, a linguistic activity. In political activities, language is employed as a device to inform others about political issues and persuade them to adopt certain concepts concerning these issues. Political euphemism is one of the most important rhetorical devices employed in the political field. It first functions as an effective device to avoid the mentioning of some taboo words or phrases. And it secondly avoids the employment of rude expressions which may sound offensive to the audience. This thesis employs the two major principles of the Pragmatics to study the use of political euphemisms on war, with corpus collected from the official website of the White House.The thesis consists of six chapters, exploring earlier studies on euphemisms, with an emphasis on the relationship between political euphemisms on war and several important theories of Pragmatics, such as the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle.It finds out that the four maxims of Cooperative Principle are all involved with political euphemisms. In an utterance, usually more than one maxim is involved. Sometimes, in order to obey one maxim, the other maxims may be flouted. Similarly, the maxims of the Politeness Principle are also frequently involved in the political talks about the war.