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Argumentative Euphemisms, Political Correctness and Relevance

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Argumentative Euphemisms, Political Correctness and Relevance Argumentative Euphemisms, Political Correctness and Relevance Thèse présentée à la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines Institut des sciences du langage et de la communication Université de Neuchâtel Pour l'obtention du grade de Docteur ès Lettres Par Andriy Sytnyk Directeur de thèse: Professeur Louis de Saussure, Université de Neuchâtel Rapporteurs: Dr. Christopher Hart, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University Dr. Steve Oswald, Chargé de cours, Université de Fribourg Dr. Manuel Padilla Cruz, Professeur, Universidad de Sevilla Thèse soutenue le 17 septembre 2014 Université de Neuchâtel 2014 2 Key words: euphemisms, political correctness, taboo, connotations, Relevance Theory, neo-Gricean pragmatics Argumentative Euphemisms, Political Correctness and Relevance Abstract The account presented in the thesis combines insights from relevance-theoretic (Sperber and Wilson 1995) and neo-Gricean (Levinson 2000) pragmatics in arguing that a specific euphemistic effect is derived whenever it is mutually manifest to participants of a communicative exchange that a speaker is trying to be indirect by avoiding some dispreferred saliently unexpressed alternative lexical unit(s). This effect is derived when the indirectness is not conventionally associated with the particular linguistic form-trigger relative to some context of use and, therefore, stands out as marked in discourse. The central theoretical claim of the thesis is that the cognitive processing of utterances containing novel euphemistic/politically correct locutions involves meta-representations of saliently unexpressed dispreferred alternatives, as part of relevance-driven recognition of speaker intentions. It is argued that hearers are “invited” to infer the salient dispreferred alternatives in the process of deriving explicatures of utterances containing lexical units triggering euphemistic/politically correct interpretations. In the course of time, such invited inferences can lead to semantic change by becoming routinized relative to some context of use and reanalyzed as the defeasible default meanings of these locutions, presumed in the absence of contextual assumptions to the contrary. This conventionalization process is responsible for euphemisms becoming “contaminated” with negative connotations associated with taboos, which leads to their recycling in the vernacular or ‘euphemism treadmill’. It also explains why political correctness is effective only when it is novel and still capable of bringing people’s unconscious biases to consciousness. The biases are, arguably, brought to consciousness by metarepresenting the salient dispreferred alternatives as part of comprehension of utterances containing PC locutions perceived to be marked in the given context. It is suggested that the likelihood of the euphemism treadmill taking place is increased in cases of narrowing the lexicalized meaning of a concept to its taboo meaning, while it is less likely to happen in cases of conceptual broadening. 3 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere and profound gratitude to my supervisor, Louis de Saussure, for all the work he has put into directing this thesis, his intellectual guidance, continuous support, outstanding patience and believing that this project can be brought to fruition and to the University of Neuchâtel for accepting me as a doctorate student and supporting my research-related activities in Switzerland. Among the people whose contributions I would like to acknowledge gratefully are Svitlana Petrovska, who originally encouraged me to undertake research in linguistics. Some time later, Valery Mykhailenko streamlined my attention towards pragmatic aspects of communication, which eventually brought me to reading works of Vlad Žegarac and Billy Clark on phatic communication and Relevance Theory, which, in turn, ignited my interest in exploring the possibility of applying the tools of this cognitive-pragmatic theory to examining the dimensions of communication, traditionally analyzed within the frameworks of sociolinguistic theories. This thesis would not have come to life without the illuminating discussions with Steve Oswald, Patrick Morency, Mihaela Popa, Marina Terkourafi, Rachel Giora, Billy Clark and Manuel Padilla Cruz on the topics of euphemisms, political correctness, manipulation and the pragmatics of politeness. I am sure many scholars doing research within the framework of Relevance Theory feel as grateful as I am to Francisco Yus for constantly updating the Relevance Theory Online Bibliographic Service and to Nicholas Allott for maintaining the Relevance Theory Mailing List. I thank Volodymyr Khaloupko, Olexander Keba, Olexander Volkovynskiy and, certainly, my wife/colleague Nataliya Sytnyk for sharing their insightful thoughts and discussing various philological and philosophical issues pertaining to my research on many an occasion. I am also thankful to all my good friends and colleagues for the much needed sanity- preserving distractions from the thesis-writing process. Last but not least, I thank my family for their love and support. 4 Contents Introduction 8 Chapter 1. Pragmatics of verbal communication 16 1.1 The code model and Gricean pragmatics 16 1.2 Relevance-theoretic pragmatics 20 1.2.1 Theory of mind and mutual manifestness 20 1.2.2 The relevance-seeking processing model 23 1.2.3 The RT notion of context 28 1.2.4 Descriptive and interpretive use 30 1.2.5 The limitations of RT analysis 33 1.3 Presumptive vs. speaker-intended meanings 36 1.4 Processing figurative language 45 1.4.1 The priority of literal meaning 45 1.4.2 The salience of primary meanings 52 Chapter 2. Semiotics of x-phemisms 56 2.1 Taboo 56 2.1.1 Ancient fear-based taboos 56 2.1.2 Modern-day taboos 61 2.2 Synonymy and concepts 63 2.2.1 Absolute and near-synonymy 63 2.2.2 Connotations and perspectivization 68 2.2.3 Mental representation of concepts 75 2.2.3.1 Imagistic and propositional representations 75 2.2.3.2 Conceptual representation of cross-varietal synonyms 81 2.3 Definitions and suggested ways of formation 85 2.3.1 Lexical-semantic and structural means of euphemization 85 2.3.2 Euphemisms as conceptual metaphors/metonymies 90 Chapter 3. Political correctness: general issues 96 3.1 History and the origin of the term “PC” 96 3.2 PC as the marked choice 99 3.3 PC-inspired metonymic references 103 3.4 PC evaluated negatively 108 5 3.5 Mock PC, alternative curse words and creativity 112 Chapter 4. Functions of euphemisms/PC in discourse 118 4.1 Conventionalized vs. argumentative euphemisms 118 4.2. The issue of cooperativeness 124 4.3 Spheres of use: jargon and doublespeak 130 Chapter 5. X-phemisms/PC and intentionality 137 5.1 Euphemisms/PC as intentional acts of communication 137 5.2 Assessing the x-phemistic value 142 5.2.1 Derogatory and appropriated uses of slurs 142 5.2.2 To praise or to offend? 150 5.3 Explicating the euphemistic/PC intentions 157 5.4 Distinguishing euphemisms from PC 163 Chapter 6. X-phemisms/PC and (im)politeness 170 6.1 The Speech-Act theoretic view of (im)politeness 170 6.2 Politeness: inferred vs anticipated 178 6.3 X-phemisms/PC and (im)politeness 183 Chapter 7. X-phemisms/PC and ideology 188 7.1 PC and Critical Discourse Analysis 188 7.2 Framing the point of view in discourse 192 7.3 The manipulative dimension of euphemisms/PC 201 7.3.1 Manipulation and the depth of processing 201 7.3.2. Manipulation and theory of mind 204 Chapter 8. The online processing of utterances containing euphemisms/PC 210 8.1 The Gricean perspective 210 8.2 The RT perspective 213 8.2.1 Euphemisms as optimally relevant inferences 213 8.2.1 Processing effort as a criterion for markedness 217 8.2.3 Euphemisms/PC as echoic interpretive use 223 8.3 The conventionalization cline 234 Chapter 9. A lexical-pragmatic account of euphemism treadmill 243 9.1 Lexical pragmatics and semantic change 243 9.2 Euphemisms treadmill as semantic change 252 9.3 The sources of associative contamination 263 6 Conclusions 269 References 280 7 Introduction Introduction The thesis is intended as a contribution to the ongoing semantics/pragmatics interface debate. It pursues the general goal of attempting to ascertain what predictions pragmatic theories of communication can make in terms of the cognitive procedures brought to bear on the online processing of utterances containing lexical units, which trigger euphemistic/politically correct interpretations. The introductory chapter presents arguments for choosing euphemisms and political correctness as the object of the thesis, explains the relevance of the topic in the general context of pragmatics research and stresses the importance of undertaking a pragmatic approach to its investigation. Chapter 1 of the thesis reviews and critically assesses the main tenets of Gricean, relevance-theoretic and neo-Gricean pragmatics. It also reviews how various pragmatic theories deal with figurative language processing and what suggestions they make regarding the stages along which comprehension of what people intend to communicate when they speak figuratively takes place. Chapter 2 dwells on such semiotic notions as synonymy, ancient fear-based and contemporary taboos, connotations and markedness as relevant for the analysis of euphemisms. It reviews the issue of how concepts are represented in human cognitive systems and examines various definitions and ways of formation of euphemisms presented in extant research literature on the topic. Chapter 3 introduces the notion of political correctness (PC), reviews the history of the
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