Russian Euphemism Study

Euphemism is a common phenomenon in each race of the world. The earnest observation will find that it is frequently used in social life. Euphemism contains rich contents, reflects the social life from different perspectives and plays a great part in the daily life. In addition, euphemism contributes greatly to the interpersonal relations in the social interactions. Since its birth, it has shown its great developmental potentiality and continually attracts the attention of such experts as anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, psychologist and litterateurs. Language is the tool of mankind's social intercourse, and the carrier of the social culture. The ways of expressing euphemism in different countries may vary greatly.After reading some materials about euphemism, I have an urge to study euphemism systematically, hoping to acquaint Russian learners with euphemism and with it to guide the social practice, foreign language teaching and social communication and to train the students to intercultural consciousness and make them know more about mental features and social values of Russians in using euphemism.By analyzing the social functions of Russian euphemisms and its unique means of expression, the paper is intented to make the learners get to know the features and functions of Russian euphemisms. The highlight is that while learning and using the theories about euphemisms, the paper compares euphemisms and some theories concerned in Pragmatics and clarifies the relations between them; finds out the reasons for the students'actual uses of euphemisms in different circumstances; and analyses the relations between euphemisms and Indirect Speech Act, Politeness Principles and conversational implicature, which enriches the ways of studying Pragmatics.The paper contains 5 parts totally:Chapter I: preface.This part states the definition and some theories of euphemism and the aims and tasks of the paper.Chapter II: this part exemplifies the main means of expressing euphemisms. Russian is greatly rich in its means of expressions, such as by lexicon, rhetoric, grammar,phonology,discourse.Chapter III: this part discusses the social functions of euphemisms by combining the Russian mentality and the cultural features. The main functions of euphemism are taboo-avoiding function, politeness function, deception function and self- protection function.Chapter IV: this part analyses the pragmatic motives of euphemism by taking pragmatics into account; discusses the relations between euphemisms and Indirect Speech Act,...