The Cognitive Prominence of Euphemism Production: A Perspective of the Embodied-Cognitive Approach

Abstract

The previous research on euphemism is mainly conducted from the perspectives of traditional linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of mind, but few studies focus on the cognitive prominence of euphemism production from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach. This paper takes the euphemisms in English literary works as the corpora and explores the cognitive prominence of euphemism production from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach to reveal the production mechanism of euphemism. It is found that euphemism production highlights the linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of identity, causal implication, and supervenience with reality. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of identity with reality explains that euphemism is in place of the common expression to direct at an unpleasant or embarrassing thing or event in reality because euphemism is identical to common expression. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of causal implication with reality accounts for the fact that the interaction between the mental and the physical follows the principle of causal interaction. Common expression causally implicates euphemism and the causal implication between them is restricted by the specific context and the linguistic subject’s intentionality. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of supervenience with reality indicates that the consciousness of the linguistic subject towards the described thing or event supervenes globally on its physical property. Euphemism production is the result of the linguistic subject’s embodied cognition with reality. Cognitive prominence from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach has very strong explanatory power over the production mechanism of linguistic expressions.