Abstract
Abstract Despite the stigma attached to human defecation and people’s reluctance to talk about it openly, there are certain communicative situations in which one cannot evade referring to the elimination of body wastes. This is the case of laxative TV commercials, a type of discourse focused on the infrequent or difficult evacuation of the bowels that constitutes a breeding ground for euphemism. In this regard, following a socially-oriented approach to discourse analysis, politeness theory, and cognitive linguistics, the purpose of this paper is to gain an insight into the way euphemism works in a sample of contemporary American TV commercials advertising laxatives. The analysis reveals that euphemism – mostly in the form of metonymy and understatement – and non-euphemistic metaphors and similes serve as face-saving mechanisms for the company’s self-presentational purposes and are ultimately used as part of a sales strategy aiming to attract the interest of viewers.
Highlights
Human defecation, a normal bodily process, is surrounded by disgust, secrecy, and shame
This is the case of laxative TV commercials, a type of discourse focused on the infrequent or difficult evacuation of the bowels that constitutes a breeding ground for euphemism
In this regard, following a socially-oriented approach to discourse analysis, politeness theory, and cognitive linguistics, the purpose of this paper is to gain an insight into the way euphemism works in a sample of contemporary American TV commercials advertising laxatives
Summary
A normal bodily process, is surrounded by disgust, secrecy, and shame. Following politeness theory and a discourse-analytic and cognitive linguistic approach to language data, the purpose of this paper is to gain an insight into the way euphemism is used in American TV commercials advertising over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription laxatives from 2013 to 2018.1 As euphemism is a contextbound phenomenon, this study is not based on isolated words, but on a sample of real and contextualized language use collected from TV commercials This task seems to be a worthy enterprise because, to the best of my knowledge, no study so far has been exclusively devoted to the way euphemism serves the purpose of providing reference to scatological phenomena in real language. The conclusions and final results will be reported in the end
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