精品英语专业毕业论文 English Euphemism.doc

English Euphemism 摘要：委婉语源于社会禁忌，既有宗教性、阶级性，又有时代性，在不同程度上反映了某一国家、地域和时代所认同的思维模式、价值观和道德观等。委婉语是英汉语言中共同的语言现象，多种形式的委婉语折射出中西方形态各异的社会文化背景，反映出形形色色的社会心理状态和语言文化内涵。了解东西方委婉语的文化差异，有益于减少跨文化交际中的障碍。 关键词：委婉语；禁忌；文化渊源 Abstract: Euphemismcultural phenomenon. Euphemism stems from social taboo, it has the state of being religious, class as well as times, and to varying degrees it reflects the pattern of thinking, values, moral concept etc.. of one country, region and era approved. Euphemism is the common language phenomenon in both English and Chinese, diversified forms of euphemism refract out different forms of cultural background between Chinese and Western, refract every description of social psychological condition, language and cultural intension. It is useful to reduce the obstacle in cross-language communication by finding out the cultural difference of euphemism between East and West. Key words: euphemisms; taboo; cultural origin Introduction Euphemism and historical linguistics Historical linguistics has revealed traces of taboo deformations in many languages. Several are known to have occurred in Indo-European, including the original Indo-European words for bear (*rktos), wolf (*wlkwos), and deer (originally, hart). In different Indo-European languages, each of these words has a difficult etymology because of taboo deformations — a euphemism was substituted for the original, which no longer occurs in the language. An example is the Slavic root for bear—*medu-ed-, which means honey eater( Levinson , 2001) In some languages of the Pacific, using the name of a deceased chief is taboo. Since people are often named after everyday things, this leads to the swift development of euphemisms. These languages have a very high rate of vocabulary change. The euphemism treadmill Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process the linguist Steven Pinker has called the euphemism treadmill (cf. Greshams Law in economics). Words originally intended as euphemisms, or pol