engleski

Euphemisms in the language of politics or how metonymy opens one door but closes the other

The paper deals with the role metonymy tends to play in the structure of euphemisms as an important factor in the language of politics. Discourse analysis should show the structural makeup of euphemisms, the degree of their complexity and what are the pragmatic inferences of their use. At some points euphemisms seem to create a rather crass diversion from almost all Gricean maximes. English examples of euphemisms of the type: 'body count' or 'air support', extracted from the articles in daily newspapers, written documents and dictionary corpora, will be studied in the light of the cognitive theory which considers metonymy to be a part of the 'Idealized Cognitive Model' or a scenario where this cognitive process facilitates a mental access to a concept where a euphemism replaces politically 'incorrect' expressions. Metonymic mapping is specific for its one-correspondence mapping, i.e. both the source and the target concept belong to the same domain, and precisely this contiguity quality, or the proximity of the concepts involved in the mapping renders this cognitive process a perfect candidate for construing euphemistic expressions. One of the most ubiquitous metonymies in the context of euphemisms is PART OF THE SCENARIO FOR THE WHOLE SCENARIO, typical of the above examples as well, where it serves as a vehicle to accessing the target concept via some narrowed or semantically bleached content. Considered to be a universal cognitive category, metonymy will be traced in some more or less parallel Croatian euphemistic structures in an attempt to reveal whether the same mechanisms govern the choice of linguistic units entering these structures too.

euphemisms; metonymy; metaphor; pragmatic inference; cognitive linguistics; metonymic mapping; face-saving approach; politeness effect; conceptual iconicity; cognitive prerequisites

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