A Study Of Pragmatic Mechanism Of English Euphemism

Euphemism is a kind of widely-used means of expression to make people's daily communication smooth and satisfying. English euphemism is an important part of pragmatics and there are many researches focused on it both at home and abroad. These researches mainly cover the features, formation and application of English euphemism. Generally speaking, the most frequently used theories are Austin's Speech Act Theory, Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and the Face Theory. However, there are few researchers who studied the pragmatic mechanism of English euphemism.Based on the former researchers' study, this thesis takes the method of case study, uses the euphemisms in the American movie Forrest Gump as its corpus and raises three research questions:1.What are the major categories of euphemisms in the movie Forrest Gump? 2.What are the formative devices of euphemisms in this movie? 3.What's the interpretative mechanism of English euphemism? The author collects the euphemisms of this movie, analyzes them and researches these three questions. The thesis finds that all of the euphemisms in Forrest Gump belong to oral euphemism, which can be further divided into general and temporary euphemism from the perspective of using frequency. And from the perspective of sentimental coloring, oral euphemism can be divided into positive and negative euphemism. In the movie Forrest Gump, the most frequently used euphemisms are general and negative euphemisms. There are mainly four formative devices of euphemisms in this movie:phonetic device, lexical device, grammatical device and rhetorical device, and the author introduces these devices in detail in Chapter Four. And then the author analyzes the interpretative mechanism of English euphemism in the form of flow chart, which guides people in classifying the euphemisms in daily communication and interpreting whether they accord to the Speech Act Theory, the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle and the Face Theory or not. And this mechanism guides people in understanding and using euphemisms more smoothly. At last, this thesis analyzes the influences and functions of euphemism in the field of English teaching and cross-culture communication.