EUPHEMISTIC SEMANTICS: CONCEPTUAL AND FUNCTIONAL FEATURES OF THE IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

The paper deals with euphemism semantic changes cognitive mechanisms that are crucial for understanding the euphemization process. Their significance is determined by the influence on the functional purpose and pragmatic peculiarities of the lexical item and on the conceptual content related to it. As such, the paper describes mechanisms of refocusing, ontologization and privatization of new knowledge and its metarepresentation in language. Refocusing is interpreted in the categories of cognitive integration as its special case (method), the peculiarity of which consists in the focus shift from one feature (contained in the name of the antecedent) to another (constituting the motive of renaming) when nominating the object. The second part, basing on concrete examples, covers the issue of correlations between the conceptual content and lexical meaning, their influence on euphemistic unit functioning, and the conditioning of the euphemization degree by context.