从象似性角度分析《老友记》中的英语委婉语-外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

Abstract Emerging in the early times of human civilization, Euphemism is a wide and common phenomenon of language in the world. The important role of euphemism in our daily communication has aroused a lot of linguists’ interest. They have carried out extensive research on euphemism from different angles, such as rhetoric, semantics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. But these studies only described the inner structure of euphemism. Most of them have ignored its outer elements, which are called the correspondence between the structure and the objective reality. Therefore, to adopt a new way to study the formation mechanism of Euphemism is extremely necessary. Cognitive Linguistics, formed in the late 1980s, is a new way to study language based on people’s experience of the world and their perception towards the world. Iconicity, which Pierce first proposed as a vital theory of cognitive Linguistics, attempts to explore the relationship of mapping between cognition and language structure. On the basis of iconicity theory, the paper attempts to investigate the forming mechanism of English euphemism chosen randomly in the preceding 3 seasons of the famous American TV series Friends from the iconic angle. And its purpose is to interpret the relationship of mapping between the linguistic form and conceptual structure of euphemism mainly manifested in the three types of iconicity principles. They are quantity iconicity, markedness iconicity and distance iconicity. On the basis of these three iconicity principles, the author analyses euphemism and discovered that iconicity resides in different levels of euphemism, such as the lexical level, the grammatical level, the rhetorical level and so on. Based on this study, the author finds that iconicity can interpret the forming mechanism of English euphemism in a reasonable way. This will assist us comprehend the structure of English euphemism in a theoretical approach. Besides, this research can facilitate the English