Euphemism is a discursive strategy that politicians use to approach unsettling, embarrassing, or distasteful, i.e. taboo, topics without appearing inconsiderate to people’s concerns. Following a critical discourse-analytic approach to political language, this paper discusses the communicative functions that euphemism performs in the discourse of local and state politicians from New Jersey (USA) in a sample of language data excerpted from The Star-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. The analysis reveals that (metaphorical and non-metaphorical) euphemism constitutes a major strategy of self-protection and positive self-presentation for legislators which allows them – mostly by understatement, periphrasis, and metaphor – first, to refer to socially disadvantaged groups or address delicate subjects without sounding insensitive; second, to criticize their political opponents in a socially acceptable way; and third, to purposely conceal from the public unsettling or controversial topics.
2006Forbidden Words. Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bublitz, Wolfram
2015 “Introducing Quoting as a Ubiquitous Meta-communicative Act”. In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, ed. by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 1–28. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Burridge, Kate
2012 “Euphemism and Language Change. The Sixth and Seven Ages”. Lexis. Journal in English Lexicology 71: 65–92.
Cameron, Deborah
2012Verbal Hygiene. London and New York: Routledge.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2004Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2014 “The Metaphor of the ‘Body Politic’ across Languages and Cultures”. In Cognitive Explorations into Metaphor and Metonymy, ed. by Frank Polzenhagen, Zoltán Kövecses, Stefanie Vogelbacher, and Sonjia Kleinke, 85–99. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Musolff, Andreas
2016Political Metaphor Analysis. Discourse and Scenarios. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
2000 “The Role of Mappings and Domains in Understanding Metonymy”. In Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, ed. by Antonio Barcelona, 109–132. Berlin: De Gruyter.
2016 “Connecting Political Communication with Urban Politics: A Bourdieusian Framework”. International Journal of Communication 101: 508–529.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
1997 “What is Political Discourse Analysis?” In Political Linguistics, ed. by Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen, 11–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van Dijk, Teun A.
2006 “Politics, Ideology, and Discourse”. In Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by Ruth Wodak, 728–740. London: Elsevier.
Wilson, John
2001 “Political Discourse”. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 398–416. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer
2015 “Critical Discourse Studies: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology”. In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 1–22. London: SAGE.
Yu, Ning
2008 “Metaphor from Body and Culture”. In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Raymond W. Gibbs, 247–261. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zarefsky, David
(ed)2014Political Argumentation in the United States. Historical and Contemporary Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Amernic, Joel & Russell Craig
2022. Evaluating assertions by a Wells Fargo CEO of a ‘return to ethical conduct’. Leadership► pp. 174271502110643 ff.
Chovanec, Jan
2019. Euphemisms and non-proximal manipulation of discourse space: The case of blue-on-blue. Lingua 225 ► pp. 50 ff.
2021. The Nation as a Body or Person in Present-Day British Political Discourse. In National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic [Cultural Linguistics, ], ► pp. 35 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.