Novel veiling and concealing euphemisms in political discourse

Abstract

This qualitative research explores the differences in the interpretation of novel veiling and concealing euphemisms from a relevance-theoretic perspective. I argue that the relevance of an utterance containing a novel veiling euphemism is established (1) via the adjustment of its linguistically encoded meaning so that it communicates the meaning encoded by a dispreferred expression, which is derived as an explicature, or (2) via its linguistically encoded meaning, derived as an explicature, and the meaning encoded by a dispreferred expression, recovered as a strong implicature. The relevance of an utterance containing a novel concealing euphemism is established via its linguistically encoded meaning, recovered as an explicature, and via weak implicatures. The recovery of weakly implicit content is not essential for inferring the speaker’s meaning.