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Euphemistic and dysphemistic effect of apophasis or “Don’t think of an elephant” - revisited

When analyzing political and public discourse in general, one of the traditionally recognized rhetorical figures particularly successful in its rhetorical function of persuasion is apophasis or praeteritio (Škarić 2008). A curious mixture of euphemistic and dysphemistic effects, it has a form of negating the content of the utterance while actually attracting the attention of the listener by introducing the concept which is, at the first glance, to be negated: “I don’t want to say that he’s bad, but some of his actions should be considered with great care.” Although not explicitly dealing with negation as such, Lakoff’s book on framing the political debate entitled Don’t Think of an Elephant (2004) clearly exhibits its power: we are neurologically wired to process the content which is negated and thus susceptible to the meaning of the affirmed conceptualframe. The euphemistic force of this type of utterances is obvious, especially if one considers the context of their use, which is to raise criticism indirectly, for taboo topics or for what would be termed politically incorrect language. This case of the so called ‘transferred negation’ (Shi &Sheng 2011) usually happens with verbs of speaking and thinking, transferring the notion of the speaker’s personal stance and, consequently, strengthening the euphemistic effect. A strange dysphemistic aftertaste of these negation constructions is felt if the initial item negated is negative itself (cf. ‘bad’ above), followed by a contrast clause introduced by ‘but’ or some similar disjuncts. The so called ‘retention effect’ (Giora et al. 2004) suggests that salient meanings of negated concepts are not wiped out even when comprehenders are allowed extra processing time rendering this type of negation construction suitable for innumerable ways of framing the discourse in the desired direction. In order to recognize the universal rhetorical value of apophatic constructions, we have done small scale corpus searches in two corpora, COCA (English examples) and hrWaC (Croatian examples, in order to establish their typical structure and context of use, which coincides to a high degree with the suggested euphemistic and dysphemistic function. The second step was to establish their role and universal nature in our corpus of public political speech events in English, Croatian, German and French, in the media discourse and in other types of discourse involved in shaping the public opinion, extracted from the Internet sources. The third step will include a survey among Croatian students of English which is to establish the validity of the constructional nature of apophatic structures by presenting them with a set of claims containing only the initial part of the sentence. The results should prove the validity of Vosshagen’s (1999) notion of the role of metonymy in so called ‘evaluative opposition’ where metonymies highlight certain aspects of domains involving opposites.

apophasis ; euphemisms ; dysphemisms ; framing

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