吉林大学硕士学位论文.docVIP

吉林大学硕士学位论文 2 meanings, characteristics of the euphemistic items one by one. While traditional western scholars’ studies on euphemism were only restricted to the level of lexicon, D. Bolinger, an American linguist, broke down the limitation. He (1981: 148) pointed out: “There are grammatical ways of toning something down without actually changing the content of the message.” Under the influence of his theory, the grammatical ways to form euphemism such as negation, tense, voice, and mood have been paid attention to. Neaman and Silver (1983: 1) gave more precise account of euphemism in their famous book—Kind Word: A Thesaurus of Euphemisms, “Euphemizing is generally defined as substituting an inoffensive or pleasant term for a more explicit, offensive one, thereby veneering the truth by using kind words.” They not only provided detailed interpretation of the euphemistic items, but also advanced a diachronic standpoint to study euphemism and culture: “What subjects and what portions of them were acceptable or forbidden have varied both from culture to culture and from one historical period to another within a single culture” (ibid: 167). D. J. Enright’s Fair of Speech: the Uses of Euphemism (1985) is a collection of many pieces of essays, and each discusses the use of euphemism in some specific domain. The comprehensive presentation of the book is valuable for further studies on euphemism. According to Allan and Burridge, euphemism is defined with reference to concerns about face. They claimed in their famous book Euphemism and Dysphemism (1991), “A euphemism is used as an alternative to a dispreferred expression, in order to avoid possible loss of吉林大学硕士学位论文 4 定芳) published his “New Investigation on Euphemism” in Foreign Languages. In this paper he enlarged the study scope of euphemism by applying pragmatic theories, and proposed three constructing principles—distant, relevant and sweet-sounding principle. The Interpretive Capacity of the Theory of Fuzzy Linguistic Sho