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A Brief Analysis of Political Euphemism from
the Perspective of Pragmatics
1. Introduction
Euphemism is defined in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (2003) as “Substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.” The word “euphemism” is derived from Greek. The prefix “eu-” means “good, well”; the stem “pheme” means “speak”; the suffix “-ism” means “action or result”. The word means “speaking well of…”, “good speech” , and “words of good omen”.
Originally, people use words for good omen in sacrificial rites of ancient Greece to avoid a taboo. These words are euphemisms. In antiquity, people could not speak taboo words. For example, they named Erinyes “the Kindly ones”, for people could not call god’s name. In term of the Black Sea, they called it “the Friendly Sea”, for they were afraid of calamity at sailing. (Liu Chunbao,2001:5) In modern society, euphemism is used in all kinds of areas, and it can be divided into a lot of types, 本英语毕业论文由英语论文网www.51lunwen.org整理提供such as occupation, disease, death, sex, crime, politic and so on. Political euphemism is different from others, because it has obvious features of evasion and covery. Officers and politicians often use political euphemisms in their speech and public remark. This paper focuses on the pragmatic features of political euphemism so that readers can have a better understanding into of it.
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell says “Political language is…designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind…To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”(Wu Jun,2006:51) This is so-called “Orwellian speech”. It refers to all kinds of words and behaviors that are not democratic or politically cheatful. In 1984, Orwell said: “That society was characterized by constant surveillance of its citizens, and omnipresent media controlling their minds with propaganda, torture of dissidents, and especially newspeak.”(Chen Lianjie,2003:92)
Actions and behaviors of every government, party, and leader are political. Their objective is to defend their status of domination and safeguard their own interests. In the western countries, when serious political scandals or great political events happen, the government and leaders usually use political language to hide the truth and commit a fraud upon the public. So a lot of euphemism in official media and documents appears. During The Second World War, Nazi Germany uses a large number political euphemism to cover the truth, such as, ruckkehr unerwunscht(means return unwanted, to kill), strategic camp(means concentration camp), final solution(means killing of Jewish people).
Up to the present moment, there have been many researches about political euphemism (Liu Chunbao, 2001; Chen Lianjie, 2003; Wu Jun, 2006; Jiang Lin, 2002; Yan Jia, 2006; Lu Lichun, 2007.) These researchers have made intensive research of political euphemism from many different angles, such as pragmatics, lexicology, rhetoric, syntax and semantics aspects.
   So far although many researches have researched euphemism from the perspective of pragmatic, but for sorts of euphemism, there are few study of political euphemism. This paper focuses on this problem and is expected to analyze political euphemism from three pragmatic perspectives: Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, and Non-conventional本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。