A Pragmatic Analysis Of Euphemism From The Perspective Of Fuzzy Linguistics

The innovation of methods of communication accelerates the pace of socialinvolvement and interactivity. Language, as a medium of human communication,conveys message and expresses emotions. It was generally acknowledged thatexpressions via language should be simple and direct to fulfill its target of effectivemutual understanding while vagueness and ambiguity may put a shadow on it, causemisunderstanding or even release a false message. However, in the real course of life,they are astonished to see that vagueness or fuzziness prevails than they expected. What’smore, they lead to a better and smoother ending in communication, especially theeuphemism with vague or fuzzy concept-fuzzy euphemism.Euphemism is a linguistic symbol, a unique and roundabout way of expressingwhat the speaker really thinks. It is more of a linguist phenomenon to reach an idealcommunicative effect, a language art of vague expression. One of its significantproperties is using abstract and ambiguous concepts or using indirectness to talk aboutsomething that either hard to say or unpleasant to ear. So, vagueness is its first and mostessential feature.In the year1965, L. A. Zedeh, an expert in California published his most remarkableFUZZY SET in Information and Control, which proposed his most prestigious fuzzy settheory. After that, the word “fuzzy” hit the headline in every field of science and arts:fuzzy math, fuzzy grammar fuzzy control, etc. Meanwhile, fuzzy set theory provided anew researching approach in the field of linguistics—fuzzy linguistics, which is amilestone of combination of scientific way of thinking and linguistic analysis of language.Fuzzy linguistics is a new way of studying language using fuzzy set theory to analyze thevagueness or fuzziness in the field of language. Vagueness is one of the essentialproperties of human languages. Analyzing language from the perspective of fuzzy settheory in phonetics, semantics, syntax and pragmatics tent to be the popular subjects forEnglish learners doing their research work.The subjects investigated in fuzzy linguistics broaden the horizon of linguistic field,making it wider and deeper: on one hand, fuzziness can be reached from different anglesand levels; on the other hand, fuzzy linguistics provides an opportunity of combination of fuzzy set and every part in linguistics. The fuzziness of languages can be analyzed fromthe perspective of fuzzy set, at the same time; application of fuzzy set can be acquiredthrough linguistic fuzziness in one aspect. That is to say, the width of research contents infuzzy linguistics determines the varieties of researching method.Thus, the paper tents to interpret the fuzziness, the essence of euphemism, from theperspective of fuzzy cognition and propose a new term-fuzzy euphemism. Then, analyzeits unique ways of formation and social functions to prove its beauty in communication.The paper consists of three parts, introduction, main body and conclusion.The first part, introduction presents the literature review of the studies oneuphemism home and abroad and gives the significance of choosing the topic and theimportance of pragmatic fuzziness when using euphemism.The second part is body which consists of three chapters.Chapter I is about literature reviews which are made up of two sections. The firstsection is a brief introduction about the definition of euphemism given by authorities andauthorized dictionaries, origination of euphemism, and its features, motivations and twoprinciples: Graham’s law and law of succession. The other section is about the definitionof fuzzy linguistics, illustrates the differences and relations in all kinds of fuzzy, hedge,ambiguity, vagueness, and etc. the word “fuzzy” is analyzed in different times and fromvarious experts. Thus draws a conclusion about what is the “fuzzy” of euphemisms andgives a new concept about fuzzy euphemism.As for chapter II, methods and the reasons of formation of fuzzy euphemism arediscussed compared with those of common euphemism, like phonetic devices,grammatical devices and lexical devices. Based on those existing rules, more fresh butminor forming methods are proposed, like: ellipsis, negation, analogy, and synonyms.In chapter III, which is also the last chapter, pragmatic fuzziness is presented andanalyzed here, which is a special presentation of euphemism, and adds its fuzzyappearance, lubrication; but sometimes overuse of euphemism may break down theconversation for the reason of its ambiguity and double meanings. Even thougheuphemism can go like this, what it shows in social communication is still the essence ofits pragmatic functions: namely, beauty of image, emotion connotation and politeness.The last part is a conclusion which summarizes all the question discussed above and attempts to find some new findings in the paper to interpret the generation and pragmaticfunction of fuzzy euphemisms. Some new methods have been found when collectingmaterials and more over than that is some inadequate and short of resources. Thus, somesuggestions have been put forward to English learners.