A Corpus-based Study Of War Euphemism In Iraq War News Report

The present study attempts to analyze war euphemism in Iraq war news reports corpus and to explore the mechanism of war euphemism found from the perspective of prototype theory. It built an Iraq war news report corpus on the basis of Iraq war coverage in LexisNexis and leading news websites. With the help of Wmatrix, Antconc and manual work, war euphemisms in the corpus were collected and analyzed categorically from the perspective of prototype theory. Prototype theory was then applied to explore different mechanism of war euphemism in the prototypical categories of the Iraq war corpus.The major findings of the study were:1) According to prototype theory, there were four prototypical categories of WAR in the corpus, i.e., WEAPON, MILITRAY STRATEGY, SOLDIER, and DEATH.2) The token and type of war euphemisms in the four prototypical categories varies. WEAPON had the largest token of euphemism while Death had the least type of euphemism among the four categories. Euphemism "vehicle", "deliver", "republican guard" and "lost" were the most popular euphemisms in the four categories respectively.3) Euphemistic effect of war euphemism in Iraq news reports was achieved through two mechanisms-using peripheral members or using members in superordinate categories or subordinated category.4) The proportion of the two euphemism mechanisms varied in different categories. Most war euphemisms in WEAPON category used members in superordinate categories or subordinated categories to gain euphemistic effect while those in DEATH category unanimously use peripheral members as death euphemism. Overall, most war euphemisms were found motivated by the mechanism of using members in superordinate categories or subordinate categories.The study reveals the mechanisms of war euphemisms which enables people’s better understanding of the brutal nature of wars in deed. In the meantime, by adopting a corpus approach, the study provides an updated overview of war euphemism and expands the methodological dimensions of euphemism study...