Argumentative Euphemisms, Political Correctness and - RERO DOC

320 Pages·2014·2.08 MB·English

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
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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.

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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.

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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
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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
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Conclusions 269
References 280
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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 term and discusses various linguistic manifestations of this phenomenon. It analyzes why
certain practices associated with political correctness are sometimes perceived negatively. I
also look at instance of “mock-PC” and attempt to provide theoretical explanation of the
principles along which they are coined.
Chapter 4 discusses functions of euphemisms/PC in various types of discourse. It
considers the nature and types of speaker-hearer cooperation and, following Abrantes (2005),
draws a distinction between conventionalized and transparent cooperative euphemisms, which
are listed as such in dictionaries, and non-cooperative argumentative euphemisms.
Chapter 5 addresses the role of intentionality in assessing the x-phemistic value of
utterances. It dwells on derogatory and appropriated uses of slurs and explains the notions of
euphemistic dysphemisms and dysphemistic euphemisms. It also considers the
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Introduction
methodological issue of the possibility of distinguishing euphemisms from PC-inspired
vocabulary.
Chapter 6 presents a discussion of some of the most influential theories of politeness
and analyzes whether euphemisms and political correctness can be subsumed under a broader
category of linguistic politeness.
Chapter 7 situates the PC-debate within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis
and dwells on the ideological aspects as well as the manipulative potential of euphemistic/PC
language.
Chapter 8 analyzes how utterances containing euphemisms/PC expressions are
processed online from the Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean points of view. I examine
the possibility of combining relevance-theoretic and GCI-theoretic inferential mechanics in an
account of conventionalization of meaning.
Chapter 9 presents an account of semantic change, namely of the process known as
‘euphemism treadmill’ from the relevance-theoretic lexical-pragmatic perspective.
General conclusions and implications of this research are discussed in the concluding
chapter of the thesis.
In a broad sense, the subject of this investigation is the lexical semantic relation of
synonymy, which is the paradigmatic relation between linguistic units defined in terms of
having the “sameness of sense” by Lyons (Lyons 2002: 469) or “sameness of meaning” by
Palmer (1981: 88) and Cruse (Cruse 2004: 154). More specifically, the thesis focuses on how
choices people make in using synonymous lexical units give rise to indirectness in discourse,
a (slightly exaggerated) instantiation of which is illustrated by the following exchange from
the TV show “The Big Bang Theory” (Season 5 Episode 10):
(1)
Sheldon: I believe I would like to alter the paradigm of our relationship.
Amy: I’m listening.
Sheldon: With the understanding that nothing changes whatsoever, physical or
otherwise, I would not object to us no longer characterizing you as “not my
girlfriend”.
Amy: Interesting, now try it without the quadruple negative.
Sheldon: You’re being impossible (Amy leans over to another guy). Fine! Amy, will
you be my girlfriend?
Amy: Yes.
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Introduction
As seen from the use of the indirect ‘hedged’ I believe I would like to and the multiple
negatives in Sheldon’s second statement, which he resorts to for indirectness purposes in
order to avoid uttering the straightforward Will you be my girlfriend?, in the course of
communication speakers can face cognitive dissonance1-inducing situations in which there is
a need to choose between referring to something directly or relieving oneself of some
responsibility by resorting to ‘off-record2’ communicative strategies and thereby sacrificing
semantic clarity while counting on the hearers to draw inferences regarding the intended true
meaning behind one’s words.
Speakers may resort to indirectness for argumentative purposes in various types of
discourse and it is certainly no stranger to political speeches, as illustrated, for instance, by the
following excerpt from the annual State of the Union address delivered in 2012 by the US
President Barack Obama in which he declared:
(2)
America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take
no options off the table to achieve that goal3.
Compared to the blunt we will consider declaring war on Iran, the vague and very
general expression take no options off the table is an example of how politicians resort to off-
record communicative strategies in order to be able to plausibly deny having some definite
informative intention and leave it up to their audience to guess or ‘infer’ the meaning behind
the words uttered. Depending on the manner in which the informative intention made
manifest by the very act of ostension is recognized and fulfilled (inferred), the interpretation
of take no options off the table can be broadened to include such contextually relevant
assumptions concerning possible actions against Iran as peaceful political talks, economic
sanctions, UN resolutions and a military intervention/war by some addressees of the speech,

1 According to Festinger (1957), “cognitive dissonance” is a state of tension that occurs whenever a
person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. It produces
mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to
reduce it.
2 Following (Gibbs 1999), an ‘off-record’ message is one where it is not possible to attribute only one
clear communicative intention to what the speaker says. A speaker conveys a message ‘off-record’ when he or
she can plausibly deny having that intention and can articulate a different intention that still reasonably fits with
what was said.
3 Attested: www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/01/25/2012-state-union-address-
enhanced-version#transcript
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