A Case Study Of English Euphemism In The Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of Iconicity

As a common linguistic phenomenon in all cultures, euphemism, which is intended toachieve a successful social communication, appeared in the early stage of human civilization.Since it has an important effect on people’s daily life, many linguists and scholars are veryinterested and have done much on the study of English euphemism. But traditional researchesonly pay attention to its internal structure, for example, the British linguist H. Rawson (1981)discussed English euphemism from different aspects, namely, the history, definitions, features,classifications and fields, however, the external factors that mean the structure corresponds tothe objective reality have been ignored. It is quite necessary to use a new method to explorethe mechanism of the formation of English euphemism.With the development of cognitive science which came into being in the 1980s, a newapproach to language study has come into being, which regards the use of language as howhuman beings experience the world, including how we perceive and conceptualize theexperience. There are many researches at different levels, such as phonology, morphology,syntax, etc., which are all about iconic aspects of language in the past two decades.Iconicity, firstly proposed by Peirce, as an important theory in cognitive linguistics,reflects the iconic relation between conceptual structure and human’s cognitive. It can explainlanguage phenomenon in a reasonable way which is different from the traditional methodbecause the latter just describes the language phenomenon. Grounded on the principles oficonicity, the dissertation aims to do a study, exploring euphemisms used in the first threeseasons of TV series The Desperate Housewives from the perspective of iconicity in order toexplain the mapping relation between the linguistic structure and the conceptual structure of English euphemism, which is reflected in the following three principles: quantitative iconicity,distance iconicity, markedness iconicity. By analyzing English euphemisms based on thesethree principles of iconicity, it is found that iconicity exists in English euphemisms at differentlevels.Firstly, it is concerned with the iconicity of quantity. At lexical level, there are someexamples manifesting the iconicity of quantity which involves the correspondence betweenlinguistic form and conceptual complexity. We can see that the iconicity of quantity is mainlyshown in the large or small size of English euphemism by the use of abbreviation, spellingdevice and substitution; at syntactic level, there are also demonstrations of it by the use ofhedge, omission, periphrasis. Iconicity of distance which refers to the correspondencebetween the linguistic distance and the conceptual distance between expressions is manifestedmainly by the use of the past tense and transferred negation at the syntactical level. Theprinciple of iconicity of markedness demonstrates that marked terms involve more additionalmeaning and the use of subjunctive mood and interrogative sentences can reflect the principleof markedness.According to the analysis, iconicity can explain the mechanism of formation of Englisheuphemism reasonably, which will help us understand the structure of euphemismtheoretically. Moreover, the teaching and learning of language can also be promoted by thestudy from this perspective and they will be more meaningful and efficient. Thus the study isof practical values.